Buying a Christmas nutcracker at The Christmas Shop
A Christmas nutcracker is a wooden figure with a hinged jaw, originally made to crack walnuts and hazelnuts. The classic version is a soldier or king dressed in red and black, but at The Christmas Shop you'll also find nutcrackers based on Alice in Wonderland, The Wizard of Oz and Disney, all hand-painted.
Our collection covers more than 150 different nutcrackers, ranging from miniature hanging nutcrackers of a few centimetres to imposing standing figures close to a metre tall. The wood is almost always lime or beech, both well suited to turning and painting. In our shop in Delft you can see every model in person before you decide, with the displays grouped by colour and theme.
Kurt S. Adler nutcrackers
Most of the nutcrackers in our collection come from Kurt S. Adler, a New York family firm that brought the German nutcracker to America in the years after the Second World War. The designs are still drawn up in New York, with more than twenty thousand products in the brand's full range. From that range we curate a careful selection: classic kings from around thirty euros up to exclusive collector pieces that are hard to find anywhere else in the Netherlands. The traditional soldiers are well represented, but the more eccentric designs tend to draw the eye first.
Hollywood Collection: designed by Holly Adler
The Hollywood nutcrackers stand out for their rich decoration. Holly Adler, Kurt Adler's granddaughter, designs this exclusive series with glitter, fabric, feathers and metalwork. No two pieces are alike, and the larger ones easily reach half a metre. These are the most decorative nutcrackers in our collection and look best on a sideboard or mantelpiece, where candlelight or a string of fairy lights brings out the detail.
Alice in Wonderland and The Wizard of Oz
The Alice in Wonderland nutcrackers have been one of our most popular series for years. The Cheshire Cat with his wide grin, the Mad Hatter with his enormous topper, the Queen of Hearts, and Alice herself, sometimes with her flamingo tucked under one arm. Kurt S. Adler also produces a Wizard of Oz series featuring Dorothy, the Cowardly Lion, the Scarecrow and the Tin Man. Group them together on a side table or sideboard and you've got the full cast of the story in one display.
Hanging nutcrackers for the Christmas tree
Not every nutcracker stands on the mantelpiece. The smaller hanging versions, usually around ten centimetres tall, are made to dangle from a branch. Decoris offers a nice range of hanging nutcrackers from a few euros each, with traditional soldiers alongside variants holding a candy cane, a sceptre or a gingerbread man. Mix them in with the rest of your Christmas ornaments for a nutcracker theme that carries right through the tree from top to bottom.
A short history of the nutcracker
The wooden nutcracker comes from the Erzgebirge, a mountain region on the German-Czech border with a long woodcarving tradition. Around 1865 Wilhelm Friedrich Füchtner produced the first nutcracker made on a larger scale, inspired by the book König Nussknacker und der arme Reinhold. The figures were usually dressed as soldiers or kings, authority figures said in German folklore to bring luck and protection to the home. A few decades later Tchaikovsky wrote his ballet The Nutcracker, and the figure has been a Christmas fixture ever since.
