The American Nutcracker

By Diane Reynolds

The American Nutcracker is a magical retelling of the classic Christmas children’s tale with a decidedly American twist. The American Nutcracker combines a story of nutcrackers and dolls come to life with the American log-cabin frontier ethos and the wide diversity of the American experience. A lively plot loosely based o

• Language: English
• Publisher: Diane Reynolds
• Release date: Aug 20, 2019
• ISBN: 9781733657013

Diane Reynolds

Diane Reynolds is an award-winning journalist whose work has appeared in The Washington Post, The Baltimore Sun, and Publishers Weekly among other publications. She teaches literature and writing at the university level and also holds an MDiv from Earlham School of Religion.

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Introduction

Ihave always loved The Nutcracker: Christmas, adventure, dancing, magic.… But I have also shuddered at parts of it: the rodent-infested house, the armies of bloodthirsty mice scurrying out from under the floorboards, the seven-headed mutant mouse king that the Nutcracker beheads.

I have now, however, unearthed a different version of the story, long buried in a trunk in my great-great-great grandmother’s attic. It’s called The American Nutcracker. It doesn’t involve a house swarming with long-tailed rodents or a mutant mouse king—or kings or queens at all, as we don’t have those in this country. It does involve Christmas and a log cabin and very important dolls, and a Nutcracker, as well as Native Americans and magical happenings, dancing, fighting, and fairies—and it is an American story. It’s not that I don’t love the European version—but this, I must say, has a spirit of its own.

This Nutcracker features three children at the end of a journey through the forest to Grandmother’s house. There they will eat food, and even meet with some wolves, but I don’t think you will find it anything like Little Red Riding Hood. I leave it, however, for you to decide.

CHAPTER 1

Grandmother’s House

Awagon hopped and rocked along a path through the woods in a snowy mist to Grandmother’s house. Two sturdy workhorses pulled it. They trotted briskly and shook their bells.

Sitting on the back bench bundled in blankets and scarfs and hats and gloves, three children bounced up and down with each wagon jolt.

Grandmother’s house was deep in the forest. The wagon path, once wide, narrowed. The children traveled through a tunnel of trees, branches brushing them as they passed, spilling fine, sugary snow into their laps. When Clara looked up, the frosted pines towered into the sky.

Clara, Freddie, and Louisa ricocheted up and down and back and forth like popcorn kernels in a very cold pan. They blew out steaming clouds of white that mixed with the misty fog. Their cheeks burned from the icy air, and knives of cold stabbed their frozen toes.

I can’t wait to see Grandma’s new house, said Louisa, the youngest, while bouncing up and down.

Shush, said Freddie as they jolted over a particularly jarring bump. You’ve said that a hundred thousand times. We’re not going to be able to see the house anyway in the fog.

Don’t say ‘shush’, cried Clara, and don’t exaggerate. She glanced at her parents’ stiff backs through the misty fog, as if they might turn around and tell Freddie to behave. But they sat like carved wooden figures, distant and hooded.

I’ll say whatever I want, replied Freddie. Clara leaned over little golden-haired Louisa, wedged between them, and flailed at Freddie with an icy, red-mittened hand.

Soon they were hitting at each other in the air over Louisa, scattering the snow from their mittens onto her lap.

Then they remembered how to behave, stopped, sat up straight, and stared ahead. Brothers and sisters, of course, should never quarrel with each other, but they were cold and the ride was long.

Clara couldn’t see the sun through the mist even when the fine, crystal snow had stopped falling. The fir trees, reaching over the wagon like white-clad arms, were almost hidden by fog. Occasionally, a snowy bough poked a hole through the fog, and with a long-needled finger, pointed the way to Grandmother’s house.

Finally, after the longest possible time that three children had ever sat quietly and mostly well-behaved on a wooden wagon seat, the wagon slowed, creaked, lumbered, squealed, and turned. It stopped with a lurch in a yard dotted with tree stumps covered in snow and white mist.

The log cabin was still there, but attached to it they could see a yellow frame home with green shutters, warm and