Hints and tips:
...is nearly as long as a Nutcracker, and concentration was definitely flagging during the overlong second half at Saturday morning’s matinee as the pre-school element came down from its interval sugar rush...
...Amid the toadstools, nutcrackers and plush mechanical animals stands this year’s hero piece, a papier-mâché Father Christmas (from £85) wrapped in moss....
...For everything from Christmas-tree decorations to Nutcracker figurines, this place is a delight....
...A spotted nutcracker flies between pines. A nutcracker’s tongue forks to points covered with keratin, a Swiss Army knife for conifer seeds....
...The air of surrealism here was palpable: one store morphed into a curling rink, with kettles used as slide stones skimming across the ice....
...ondine.com Alessi The Strongman Nutcracker, £1,000I love cracking my own walnuts....
...Its museum, above the shop, has a collection of typical wooden angels and nutcrackers, those highly painted military-style men with levers between their shoulder blades....
...I first visited Melbourne in 2010, to dance The Nutcracker, and I fell hard for the place....
...Fairytale favourites such as Tchaikovsky’s Nutcracker and Sleeping Beauty fill the theatre with family audiences....
...You stride through pure air, on the lookout for alpine nutcrackers, goshawks and woodpeckers....
...Well, in the US these days, many parents are turning with relief to American Girl, a store that sells wholesome, life-like dolls modelled on characters from history or around the world....
...The trio are inveterate collectors and make space in their house to display the whimsical – a nutcracker sculpted in the shape of the head of Otto von Bismarck, for instance, with the cracking device hidden...
...Those windows were magic – little animated scenes of Santa and his elves, or fairies, or The Nutcracker – and they were protected by red velvet ropes like a child’s version of Studio 54 and you lined up...
...■Antique grape scissors or nutcrackers (in good working order). Or a silver-bladed fruit knife and fork....
...And the biggest classical performance of the year - the only sell-out, in fact - is The Nutcracker, just before Christmas....
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