Dear Reader,
As my illustrator Karyn Riccelli says, sometimes an idea wells up inside and just won’t go away. She is talking about graphic arts, but her words apply equally to writing: certain ideas simply keep haunting us until we do something about them. The American Nutcracker was that way for me: a tale that popped into my mind unbidden several years ago and pestered me until I responded.
As I note in my Introduction, I wished to tell a beloved Christmas tale without armies of mice—and with an American twist (an image of dancing maple candy was an early impetus), but my desire went deeper. I have, like most people who love books, been formed by my childhood reading experiences—including various versions of the Nutcracker. I hoped to celebrate at least a little of that in this story. The American Nutcracker leans, for example, into Laura Ingalls Wilder’s Little House in the Big Woods. I hoped through that iconic story to evoke some of the simplicity that informs the American pioneer mythology (and is absent from the upper middle-class German original) and to write a tale that embraces some of the diversity of the American experience. The dolls, therefore, represent a number of different cultures, races and ethnicities that are part of American life. This Sugar Plum fairy also embraces a variety of cultures and lives in a log cabin—albeit a huge and magical one— rather than a palace.
While I hoped to create a traditional story, I also wanted to have fun. Therefore, Henry the Nutcracker is brave and yet silly, given to both melodramatic utterances and complaints about his life. He is, in his own way, a lovable kind of a nut (cracker).
On a more serious note, the book includes Native Americans who endure not always being treated with the same respect as their white counterparts—and the Oneida leader expresses some of the distress her people feel at their subordinate position vis-a-vis white society. The strong adult role models are women: a fact I didn't realize until after I had finished the story. That perhaps is a good comment on how far women have come.
I hope readers enjoy this retelling of a classic children’s tale!
Sincerely,
Diane Reynolds
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