The Tchaikovsky classic The Nutcracker is perhaps the most well-known ballet in the world. The story, which takes place on Christmas Eve, follows a little girl named Clara through a dreamscape of beautiful sets and breathtaking instrumental arrangements. And every year, performances of The Nutcracker take over the December stage, from the most humble community theaters to the Great White Way.
The story has conflict. It has romance. There’s an eccentric uncle, a bratty brother, and a truly disturbing-looking nemesis, the Rat King. And of course, there is the Sugar Plum Fairy—the ethereal star of the ballet’s third movement and the driving force behind a century’s worth of daughters begging to take ballet lessons.
The Sugar Plum Fairy is elegant. She is spry. Her movements are echoed by a celesta, a piano that sounds like bells. She represents a chaste beauty that is untainted by vanity or selfishness, which is to say—she is beauty as the innocent understand it. That kind of beauty is breathtaking to behold.
Our fallen world whispers a powerful lie about beauty—which is that it only exists as a means to exert power. But the most moving displays of beauty that have happened in this world are about giving up control. Restraint, gentleness, balance, and self-control are the hallmarks of natural beauty.
No play or performance could ever capture the elegance and hope of the scene foretold in Isaiah 9:2-3, which reads:
“The people walking in darkness
have seen a great light;
on those living in the land of deep darkness,
a light has dawned.
You have enlarged the nation and increased their joy;
they rejoice before you
as people rejoice at the harvest,
as warriors rejoice
when dividing the plunder.”
The Christmas story demonstrates the power of this kind of quiet beauty. When God sent His son, the setting was bleak. Some of the first things baby Jesus experienced—filth, poverty, being among the animals, and without a welcome place to lay His head—were indicative of the life He would lead.
But He also laid eyes on His mother, Mary—the first person to believe that He was God—and His earthly father, Joseph, who would accept Jesus as His own and teach Him a trade. Their whole lives would be defined by the life of this child, and all other ambitions they might have had have now been long forgotten.
Jesus would change history, and His parents would be swept up in the story. There was no tulle or twinkly piano in the background of this birth. Just beauty, at its purest and most jaw-dropping.
Conversation starter: What do you think is the most beautiful part of Christmastime?