Unraveling the Perfectionism of Christmas, Ballet, and ‘The Nutcracker’

I aged out of leotards and ballet—not perfectionism. But tight buns suck. And so do tightly scripted holidays.

Last December, I packed a week’s worth of clothes, an elderly miniature schnauzer, and a pile of gifts into the car to go home to Austin after nearly two years of Covid hiatus. My husband and I drove the two thousand miles between New England and central Texas over three days. I spent the long ride watching the landscape change and wishing we weren’t traveling for the holidays. Of course, I was eager to see family, friends, and decent breakfast tacos again. I was also apprehensive. We were reentering the Christmas gauntlet.

Via text, I had promised to see my aunt, uncle, their kids, and grandkids. Unfortunately, that whole branch of the family had to isolate when my cousin caught the virus (she recovered). If there was a silver lining, it was that my aunt had purchased six prime tickets for the girls in her family to see Ballet Austin’s production of The Nutcracker, and she wanted to give them to someone who could enjoy them.

I was happy to go, if not particularly excited to see the ballet for the tenth time. It was a chance to bond with my then seven-year-old niece, who had begun to describe herself as a dancer. She found the Rat King’s mask “creepy” and most of the first act to be less than riveting. But she grabbed my hand and enthusiastically whispered, “Aunt Sissy, that’s the Sugar Plum Fairy!” when the ballerina took center stage in the second act. This was why we were here. The dancer was the image of perfection in her tutu and tiara.

Over years of savvy marketing, American ballet companies have made Christmas the country’s most balletic holiday. According to industry reports, many companies make their yearly budgets off of The Nutcracker. My aunt forwarded our ticket information with the receipt attached, so I saw what she paid. They weren’t cheap. The connection between the holiday and the art is thus commercial, befitting a highly commercialized holiday. More conceptually, ballet’s insistent and exclusive understanding of what constitutes “perfection” fits the taste for color-coordinated pajama sets and manicured Christmas-tree tableaux.

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In the early twentieth century, ballet was not ubiquitous nationwide, as it is now. The art had to be sold to US audiences. During our brief chat, my aunt mentioned how happy she was that we would be able to appreciate the show. Her comment nodded toward my own dancing days but also to the assumption that ballet’s deeper beauty is hidden from its casual enthusiasts, requiring a special erudition to be understood and enjoyed fully. In other words, if she couldn’t use the table she’d reserved at the Michelin-starred restaurant, she was happy she could give it to a gourmand with a more carefully refined palate.

The attitude reflects a hundred years of rhetoric turning the ballerina into a feminine ideal and ballet into “high” culture. In my day job as an art historian, I study the visual artists who helped remake ballet into an American art through promotional photographs and specialty magazines. In the 1930s and ’40s, they were called balletomanes, a period term for ballet’s most passionate fans.

At the time, critics such as Arnold Haskell worried that the art wasn’t respected enough, and therefore it suffered “both in pride and pocket.” To reverse Haskell’s logic, the ballet intelligentsia believed that the growing middle-class market would be more likely to shell out if they saw the ballet as a status marker. Photographers like Carl Van Vechten, George Platt Lynes, and Cecil Beaton (who often photographed the British royal family) created idealized images of ballet dancers that package the art as aspiration. When my niece saw Ballet Austin’s Sugar Plum Fairy poised on her tiptoes, she saw a gendered ideal en pointe, a spinning vision of a woman beyond worries. (There’s a reason my aunt purchased tickets only for the girls.) Without knowing the source of this idea, the second grader filtered what she saw through our shared cultural expectations and knew this fairytale figure was both ballet and Christmas personified.

For the New York–based, largely queer community of balletomanes that coalesced around the choreographer George Balanchine and his patron-collaborator Lincoln Kirstein in the mid-twentieth century, the ballet was a central feature of their social and professional lives. Perhaps more importantly, it was also a place of fantasy. Within the confines of the theater, they used the ballet’s intricate designs to escape both the humdrum of daily life and existential crises—like a world war or a global pandemic.

Looking at the sculpted figures of Lew Christensen and William Dollar as the gods Orpheus and Amor, to choose one potent example, was to confront a picture of transcendence and a model of bodily perfection. Like the ballet itself, the images and publications used to advance its status took on a certain grandiosity. In a 1937 article published by The North American Review, Kirstein wrote that the ballet dancer was “a direct symbol of ideal human behavior.”

American balletomanes were successful in changing public perception and the market, especially after Balanchine’s 1954 version of The Nutcracker made a largely forgotten nineteenth-century Russian ballet an American Christmas tradition. In part due to the balletomanes’ efforts, attending the ballet today is still undoubtedly classed and—despite renewed efforts to desegregate the studio pipeline—still raced white.

While some companies have decided to reimagine the cultural imperialism of the “Coffee” and “Tea” variations, in which soloists or duos perform “Arab” and “Chinese” movements, many maintain the traditional pastiches. In Vasily Vainonen’s “Tea”, the dancers alternate between balletic, turned-out jumps and energetic hops with parallel feet meant to seem “Chinese.” “Coffee” usually shows off a dancer’s titillating flexibility, punctuated by “Arabian” flexed elbows and wrists. My niece and I were both uncomfortable watching the variation. I disliked the centuries-old Orientalism, and she, revealing a bit of elementary school shyness, was put off by the exoticized sensuality of the “Arabian” dancer’s movements, when she slid her teal harem pants into the splits.

In part due to the balletomanes’ efforts, attending the ballet today is still undoubtedly classed and—despite renewed efforts to desegregate the studio pipeline—still raced white.

Regardless of the ballet’s retrograde costumes and ideology, I still love watching the artists onstage, in part because they help me remember the craft I used to perform. Fifteen years of practice taught me to manipulate my body like a well-tuned machine. Viewed this way, the dancer’s task is not creative expression but rather the exact reproduction of movement on demand. Seated in the theater’s house, I can pierce the illusions created within the proscenium’s frame because I know how much of the staged perfection is regimented. Like a Hallmark Channel Christmas rom-com, the ballet follows precise and demanding patterns.

For me, that regimentation became quite literal when I joined my suburban high school’s drill team, a slightly surreal fusion of dance team, cheerleading squad, and ROTC. I hoped it would allow me to bridge the gap between my scholastic and extracurricular lives. After a year, I earned a hierarchical title lifted straight from the armed forces: junior lieutenant. My uniform’s sequined cowboy hat was adorned with a shiny bar as a symbol of my ersatz authority and hard-won technical expertise.

At heart, drill teams are adjuncts to football teams, so in season we took to the field weekly to perform a halftime routine dedicated to the school’s love of itself and the game. Officers were forever reminding the squad to “cover down,” to make each successive dancer disappear behind the next. At the routine’s height, we militarized the aesthetic of control in a kickline, our legs a spectacle of unified dexterity. If you lost control and overextended the arc of your fan kick, your teammate was smacked in the face by the consequences (sorry, Kristy).

Whether or not you know drill teams like the “world-famous” Kilgore Rangerettes, you likely know their jumping kicks as part of—yet again—the Christmas repertoire. Every year, the storied Radio City Rockettes mark the opening of the season at the Macy’s Thanksgiving Day Parade in red and green and gold. They’re rather less elite than the Sugar Plum Fairy in the eyes of balletomanes but equally above-it-all in presentation. Radio City’s matched set of showgirls is a wholesome, Americana amplification of the corps de ballet’s tightly wound femininity.

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Three-quarters of a century after Barbara Karinska designed the spectacular, confectionary costumes for George Balanchine’s The Nutcracker® (the Balanchine Foundation tellingly requires the registered trademark symbol), dance and Christmas are intimately intertwined. Each is wrapped in an aesthetic of perfection and expectations as high as the Rockette’s hemlines. If you’ve ever organized a family holiday, you know it’s the expectations that kill you. Everyone comes to the table with their tradition, and even the closest-knit group has someone who needs the marshmallow-topped sweet potato casserole and someone who hates it.

About a decade ago, I invited my future in-laws to a joint holiday at my mother’s house. Overwhelmed by all the moving pieces, I set a hot Pyrex of sweet potatoes (no marshmallows) in the microwave to stay warm. Some freak physics event glued the casserole to the machine’s glass turntable, and the dish shattered when I attempted to pick it up. My carefully staged illusions of control splattered on the floor along with the orange tubers.

It was a good lesson, if one I failed to fully appreciate for some time. I was raised to perform Christmas as insistently as I performed anything, trained to wrap presents in matching paper with contrasting bows for emphasis. In both ballet and Christmas tradition, there’s pleasure in craft and technique. Those more proficient in the culinary arts than I am probably enjoy making sweet potato casseroles sans glass debris. Luckily, my husband loves to cook, so I’m not solely responsible for our holiday spread. I do too when the stakes are lower. Still, we’re leaning toward something ready-made this year.

Even if you’re the Barefoot Contessa herself and a confident soloist in the kitchen, the perfection is never complete. Even Ina makes dirty dishes and perhaps, once in a blue moon, a mistake, but she has a production team ready and able to wash up and edit. No one gets to transcend, no matter how light their soufflé or polished their holiday-card photo shoot. So why do we still cling to mid-twentieth-century standards? Tradition, of course, but also the spectacle of control. Over the years, my tastes have changed. If I’m going to buy tickets to the ballet or any performance, I’ll probably choose something new to me. But when generations gather, the pull of ritual is strong.

I think the Sugar Plum Fairy’s strength is actually the cracks in her facade. Unlike most classical ballets in repertory (think Swan Lake), her professionalism plays against a touch of amateurism. In Balanchine’s famous version, which is licensed by companies nationwide, the curtain rises to reveal a semicircle of little-girl angels. They scoot into a double column and exchange places, hoist prop Christmas trees above their heads, and occasionally miss a music cue. In floats the Sugar Plum Fairy, who weaves Tchaikovsky’s theme with her feet, gently picking out the tinks with the tips of her toes. As the music lifts—ba da da daa, da duum—she extends herself out and around the soaring sound.

The choreography’s success is in the contrast between the Fairy’s lifetime of training and the angels’ beginning steps. Even on the giant stage of the vaunted New York City Ballet, the child dancers never look crisp like the pros. It would be a mistake to make them try. Green looks greener offset by red, and you need a smidgeon of reality to make the fantasy pop.

I was raised to perform Christmas as insistently as I performed anything, trained to wrap presents in matching paper with contrasting bows for emphasis.

Thanks to bad ankles and the curvaceous gifts of puberty, I aged out of leotards. I failed, however, to age out of perfectionism. A ballerina taking down her bun to have fun is cliché for a reason. (See Center Stage, Black Swan, etc.) Tight buns suck. And in my experience, so do tightly scripted holidays. My favorite recent Christmas featured zero expectations other than some good food and friends. These days, I think, more impressive than a demanding revival of the past is to celebrate a low-stress holiday with a bit of panache. (Though, of course, a conspicuously low-effort gathering produced for Instagram is another matter entirely.)

Even so, after years of volatility and schlubbing it in sweats, there’s still room for a little fuss and tradition, a few red bows and a glass of something sparkling. I don’t mean to dismiss precision. Society needs some perfectionism. Without perfectionists, there’s no buttery laminated croissants worthy of the name, no trustworthy aeronautical engineering, no Beyoncé. But do we need a perfect holiday?

Yesterday, my brother informed me that my niece is attending The Nutcracker again, this time on a school field trip. I hope she loves it. Rather than condemn virtuosic Christmas technique—bah humbug—I want to enjoy holiday revelry with a light touch. To me, that’s real virtuosity. Leave sugarplum perfection to those paid to achieve it.