Nutcracker mania

HAYDEN LAKE – He may have been allergic to nuts, but Claudia Jean Davis’ father had a taste for cracking them.

By the end of his life, Hal Davis had accumulated nearly 3,000 nutcrackers, a collection he passed on to his daughter when he died in 1989. Since then, C.J. Davis has built it to almost 3,800 nutcrackers – the second-largest collection in the world, the Hayden Lake woman said.

“You probably never knew there were so many nutcrackers,” she joked.

The collection started on a whim. In 1953, on a family trip to Iowa from their home in Wisconsin, Hal Davis picked up a gnome-shaped nutcracker made from boxwood in an antique store.

“And the collection grew,” said C.J. Davis, adding that she never truly understood her father’s fascination with nutcrackers. “Next thing I knew, they had grown faster than I could dust.”

The collection became her father’s only hobby, and when he died, she found boxes of typewritten correspondence to antique dealers and collectors that detailed Hal Davis’ worldwide search to feed his nutcracker appetite.

In the future – she hasn’t named a date yet – Davis plans to turn over her collection to the Nutcracker Museum in Leavenworth, Wash., fulfilling her father’s wishes.

But for now, Davis enjoys her in-house collection, stored in a long room lined with bookshelves.

Some of the nutcrackers are the V-shaped, hand-held kind used at home; others are delicately hand-painted masterpieces from German, Swiss, Austrian, Russian and American artists.

Each has different styles and quirks, Davis said. The German nutcrackers, for example, are made with their teeth showing. The American ones are not.

Some of the nutcrackers parrot real-life characters, such as Elvis Presley, President George Washington and Captain John Smith, who helmed the Titanic.

Others jump out of the pages of fairytales or from the screens of Disney movies: There’s Alice in Wonderland, with curly golden locks and a bottle of potion, along with the Mad Hatter and Rabbit. Dorothy and Toto are flanked by the entire gang: the Wizard of Oz, Tin Man, Scarecrow and Lion. And Donald Duck, Mickey Mouse and Pinocchio also keep company.

The biblical Moses, with wild gray hair, holds stone tablets with the Ten Commandments. And the three wise men, who followed a star to Bethlehem to find baby Jesus, stand at attention.

“I call them the three wisecracks,” Davis said.

A Rube Goldberg nutcracker takes up nearly an entire shelf with a complicated maze contraption that involves lighting a candle and burning through a straw to bring down the hammer and crack the nut. Her father concocted the design, Davis said.

Others are much simpler: In Arkansas, Davis found nutting stones, crude rocks used to break open nuts that likely date back thousands of years ago.

Davis also has gentlemen’s nutcrackers – small instruments men stowed in their pockets while in the pecan fields.

Davis and her father also each commissioned nutcrackers more than 6 feet tall carved from custom designs. Davis’ is a jolly Bavarian toasting a frothy beer mug.

She won’t divulge the cost of the Bavarian, but Davis coyly says she tells friends that she considers it her “Porsche.”

“It goes on and on and on,” Davis said of her collection. She dusts a bookshelf daily to keep up with the task. Also tucked among the many shelves are framed personal notes to Davis from nutcracker makers.

The nutcrackers are for decoration only, although “they’re all functional,” Davis said. “But I’d be afraid to (use them).”

She frequently gives talks to schoolchildren and senior citizens about nutcrackers and starting a collection. She often takes one of her favorites, a bushy fellow with a fur coat, to the schools with her. German legend holds that he rides in Santa Claus’ sleigh and slips coal in naughty children’s stockings, Davis said.

The first nutcracker in a collection must be a king, who watches over everything, Davis said. Next is the soldier, who guards the king. The third is the chimney sweep, which Germans consider to be good luck. And the fourth is a drummer or other musician to draw attention to the collection.

After those four, the rest – bakers, musicians, physicians and others – are brought to appease the king, Davis said.

Another German myth maintains that nutcrackers venture out at midnight to protect their owners – but only if the owner believes so, she said.

Does Davis?

“Of course I do,” she said. “It’s very noisy here at midnight.”