Nutcracker suite

The 11 year old got into a bit of trouble at school the other day.

His teacher had the class working on holiday placemats for their families.  He attends a public school but the kids were allowed to make their placemats appropriate to whatever holiday their families celebrate at this allegedly festive time of year.  So the 11 year old drew a Christmas scene for his placemat.

He drew a scene from The Nutcracker.

How sweet, you might be saying.  How sophisticated, maybe.  A little boy who's a fan of ballet.

He's not a fan of ballet or of the ballet, as it happens.  He's a fan of the E.T.A. Hoffman story the ballet is based on, particularly the version illustrated by Maurice Sendak, and he's an 11 year old boy, he drew the scene that would most appeal to 11 year old boys.

The battle between the mice and the toy soldiers.

The teacher did not approve.  She thought a picture of toy soldiers skewering mice with their bayonets and the Nutcracker running the Mouse King through with his sword wasn't Christmassy enough.  She suggested that the 11 year old's mother might prefer something more traditional.

The kid was dumbfounded.  The Nutcracker was a Christmas story, wasn't it?  How could a Christmas story not be Christmassy?  And he knows his mother.  He knows what she likes.  She likes drawings of Spider-man battling Doc Ock and pictures of Godzilla rampaging through Tokyo.  She likes drawings of soldiers and spacemen and Aliens versus Predators.  He knows she likes these because she posts every one he gives her up in her office.  So he had no doubt that she would have loved her placemat, and he said so.

There followed one of those wars of will between teacher and pupil that the pupil never stands a chance of winning.  The 11 year old tore up his drawing, put his head down on his desk to hide his tears, and refused to work anymore on the placemats.

And there went three recess periods out the window.  He's having lunch with the school disciplinarian the rest of the week.

That night when I talked to him about it I had to take the teacher's side.  He'd been defiant and no teacher can stand for that, nor should she have to.  We talked about how he has to obey the rules and do what's assigned.  He'd disregarded her instructions, I said, and learning to follow instructions is a kindergarten lesson.  By sixth grade it should be second nature.  Then we talked about the reasons it's a good lesson to learn, when it comes to doing work.  Nobody he admires who does anything well didn't first learn how to follow instructions.    Stan Lee, George Lucas, Peter Jackson, all his favorite actors and TV stars followed their teachers' instructions.

Some day he'll come back and ask me what to do when the instructions are wrong.

The next part of our discussion was about why the scene from the Nutcracker wasn't Christmassy enough.

I said that even though it's a Christmas story it's not a version of the Christmas story.  It's a story we tell at Christmas, that's all.

A Christmas story, I said in a patient, soothing, but still lecturing tone of voice that made me sound to myself like Davy's father at the end of an episode of Davy and Goliath, a Christmas story is a story that reminds us of or in one way or another actually re-tells the Christmas story.  The Nutcracker, I said, is a wonderful fairy tale but it isn't either explicitly or symbolically about the birth of Jesus or what Jesus's birth meant for people.  (Editor's note:  I may be wrong on this.  But I once saw an excellent production of The Nutcracker that very persuasively made it clear that it is a Freudian fable about a young girl's sexual awakening.  Nothing wrong with that, but it isn't the same rebirth and redemption message played out in It's A Wonderful Life and A Christmas Carol.)  So then we talked about the true meaning of Christmas and the reason for Jesus's coming to earth as the child of a poor couple who couldn't afford a good hotel room and why the first witnesses to his birth were outcasts and outlaws and then how kings and princes sought him out to kneel down before him.

The 11 year old knows all this but he likes the story and did most of the talking.  When we'd done with that, tying it all up by agreeing that peace on earth and good will to all were pretty neat ideas, I said, "What your teacher wanted was you to draw pictures that were about the meaning of Christmas."  And I went on to explain that all the traditional images, the toys and the stockings and the tree and the star and even Santa Claus were all symbols of the Christmas story.

This is true.

The very colors of Christmas, red and green, love and hope, are the essential messages of Christianity.

Holly, ivy, mistletoe, evergreen boughs, fir trees---symbols of hope, of life continuing even in the midst of death, of the gift of eternal life that Jesus brought.

Candy canes?  The shepherds' crooks.

Silver bells?  Those are church bells, aren't they?

Santa Claus?  Saint Nicholas, kids.  And his sleigh full of toys?  Gifts, like what the magi brought to the baby Jesus.

Even the children who get the presents are symbols---of the first child who was given presents on Christmas.

When you get right down to it the only secular images that turn up in department store windows are snowflakes and snowmen.

This isn't clever semiotics.  It's not a hermeneutical trick taught to me by trendy college professors.

It's the fall-out of 2000 years of Western art.

And as I was explaining all this to the 11 year old I got to thinking.

Just what more do those "Christians" who think that Christmas is being robbed of all its meaning want?

At this time of year you can't throw a plum pudding in any direction without hitting some public depiction of the Christmas story!

Nevermind all the Nativity scenes.  The strings of streetlights, even stop lights, blinking a bright red and green, are semaphores constantly flashing out the message, "For on this day is born unto you a Savior, which is Christ the Lord."

The art teacher at my sons' school was inspired this year.  She put all the kids to work decorating the halls, not just with boughs of holly, but with life size scenes of Santa and reindeer and Christmas trees and starry nights and toys and sleeping children and sugar plums dancing all the way from the library past the gym down to the music room and around the building and back again.

I'm hoping the principal bothered to find out that there are no Jewish or Muslim or Buddhist or Hindu kids in the school before she let the art teacher run loose.   But I'll bet she didn't, because she probably thought all the the decorations were safely "secular."   They were, but only in the sense of being non-denominationally Christian.

No little Jewish kid would have been fooled.

My best friend Sandy Weissman knew what it all meant.  Just as when I looked at the Menorah in his front window I didn't think, Gee, what pretty lights.

Somehow at eight years old I knew not to push the message of my Christmas celebrations on my Jewish friends.   Probably my mother taught me.  I had a nun in grade school who would have been happy among the Born Agains.  In class one day she told us that children who weren't baptized were not allowed into heaven.  I went home devastated, thinking that Sandy was going to hell.  My mother, who was and still is the most truly devout Catholic I've ever met, sat me down and told me the truth.

Sister Mary Francis, my mother said, is full of sh**.

Everyone knows what they're looking at when they see a Christmas tree or a candy cane.

Everyone, except the "Christians."

When the 11 year old and I were done I felt pretty proud of myself.  He seemed to have followed our discussion with interest and understanding.  I said, "So, son, now do you see why your teacher thought your drawing of a battle scene wasn't Christmassy?"

"Golly, Pop!" he exclaimed, full of respect and admiration for his old man.  At moments like this we become Andy and Judge Hardy.  "I sure do now!  No more dead mice and flashing cannon will adorn my Christmas placemats!"

"Good.  I'm proud of you, son."

"Thanks, Pop."

"You're welcome, my boy."

"Does this mean that tomorrow when I work on my new placemat I should draw a stable?"

I put my head down on my desk.

"Son," I snuffled through my tears, "I think it's time we discussed the First Amendment."

Comments

[Elsie]

Great post! Thanks for sharing! I love Sendak's illustrations. I can see why they stuck in your son's mind.

Happy holidays, Lance.

[mac macgillicuddy]

Some day he'll come back and ask me what to do when the instructions are wrong.

My 7 year old son already asks me questions like this.

I encourage him to question authority -- just not mine!

[Mary Poole]

I don't know if he is your oldest, but trust me, the questions don't get any easier as they get older.

Mary

[Dan]

In a perfect world, there would be no Christians.
Just a thought.

[alex]

The Third Reich was probably more open-minded about what constitutes art than most secondary-school teachers. Tell your son not to be discouraged. In college art classes, you can smoke dope and depict whatever subject matter you please and the instructors, if they bother to show up, will worship anything you do and give you an A.

[Melanie N. Lee]

Dear Lance:

It's September 2005, and I was reading my Christmas Blog from last year, and wondering if anyone else on the Internet besides me has seen Jesus symbolism in the Nutcracker story. You haven't--but I don't hold that against you.

Here's what I wrote in my blog entry of December 13, 2004:

Also that day (December 12), before we went to Elena's house, Becky and I were with Mom. [Elena and Becky are my sisters. --MNL] I went grocery shopping, and cooked hamburgers. I was playing "The Nutcracker" while Becky was washing dishes. She came out into the living room a couple of times to dance.

During one of the tunes, she said she was imaginging vegetables dancing around the manger. I said that you could see images of Christ in The Nutcracker: Clara is us, the Nutcracker is Jesus, the Mouse King is the Devil, the Battle is Armaggedon, and then "he takes her to a magical kingdom" which has people from many countries. She said I should turn that idea into a pamphlet.

I searched the Internet today to see if anyone else had that idea. The closest I saw was from an entry in HollywoodJesus.com, discussing the adaptation of "The Steadfast Tin Soldier" in "Fantasia 2000":

"PIANO CONCERTO #2, ALLEGRO, OPUS 102"
Composer: Dmitri Shostakovich
Director: Hendel Butoy
Art Director: Michael Humphries
Piano: Yefim Bronfman
A MUSICAL FAIRY TALE

SPIRITUAL NOTE: Watch for the death and resurrection of a wounded savior in this wonderful Hans Christian Anderson tale of the Steadfast Tin Soldier.
http://www.hollywoodjesus.com/fantasia2000_pg2.htm

MNL's Christmas Blog, 2004
http://members.tripod.com/mnl_1221/christmasblog/index.blog?start=1103054669

Just because The Nutcracker can be seen as the story of a young girl's sexual awakening--and I think it is, too!--that doesn't mean that it can't also be seen as a Jesus story. The Song of Solomon is about two lovers, but can also be seen as God and Israel, or Christ and the Church. God calls himself Israel's husband; Jesus calls the Church his bride.

That said, to me, The Nutcracker can reflect the Jesus story, but more like the book of Revelation than like the Gospel of Matthew or Luke.

Remember, also, that the Nutcracker gets broken, repaired, and transformed, like Death, Resurrection, and Glorification.

[Picknchuz]

Kids live in a fantasy world. Too bad adults have to stifle their creativity with reality, they'll get to that world soon enough. Next thing you know they'll be telling us there's no Santa Claus.

[Ryan Davis]

"Nobody he admires who does anything well didn't first learn how to follow instructions. Stan Lee, George Lucas, Peter Jackson, all his favorite actors and TV stars followed their teachers' instructions."

BULLSHIT!

All the best ignored and went against their teacher's instructions and followed their creativity. If they were super lucky, they had parents that nurtured and supported that creativity.