Nutcracker Nostalgia

For the past three years, it has become a tradition for me, at least once during the 'holiday' season, to blare Tchaikovsky's waltz of the flowers, dance around my kitchen, and cry.

I'm not saying that that very action just occurred in my kitchen yesterday. But I am also not NOT saying it, so you can do that math on that one.

For twelve years of my life, the span of time between the first weekend in September and Christmas was known as "Nutcracker Season" with the Robinson Ballet Company. We'd audition, we'd obsess over casting, we'd rehearse, we'd have the entire score memorized, and then we'd take the show on the road all over Maine (and sometimes New Hampshire). And I loved it. It was chartered buses, perfect pink tights, rehearsals every weekend, pointe shoes sewed with floss, costume changes, stage makeup, bobby pins, and all of the hairspray IN THE WORLD. On top of that, there was the familiar, glazed-over expression that friends and family would get when I broke into one of my many Nutcracker musings. Or rants, as the case may be. It was a very special time every year.



I don't usually talk about it, because it makes me sad. Not sad because I can no longer be in the show, necessarily. It's more because the path that I have taken in my life has made it so that I cannot participate in a tradition that was SO important to me as I grew up. At least, not in the same way that I used to. Sometimes, a familiar song will come over the radio in a restaurant or store as part of their holiday cheer, and I find myself welling up. I've seen a LOT of Nutcrackers, but none will ever compare with the original, the one that I grew up with.

So yesterday, while I could have been doing homework, or packing for my trip home, or cleaning the apartment so the cat-sitter won't judge me, I was instead playing the familiar music, marking out the choreography in my kitchen, and texting F, one of the only other people on the planet who can understand this feeling. "the same thing happened to me this morning," she said, "every time I hear the music on a commercial on TV I get a little bit sad and very nostalgic."

I'm not sure if she was thinking about this EXACT moment, but it was probably something similar...


Yeah. Nutcracker Nostalgia. That's what we can call it from now on.