The following story was originally divulged to the author a number of years ago by Handsome Doovers, a creepy, filthy, and untrustworthy drifter from New Jersey. This is its first time in print, which is being done without Doovers’ permission because he is dead now and refuses to speak to any visitors.

          Come, ye children and ye parents and even ye parents without any children, and hear a blessed tale of agony, despair, and other Christmastime traditions…the Tale of the Origin of the Legend of the First Nutcracker.

          Our story starts in the year 1789 with a man named Calvin Trifles, a nervous and unhappy man who had been haunted every night of his miserable life by the most peculiar of ghosts. Actually, the ghost wasn’t peculiar at all and nobody besides Calvin Trifles would ever consider this ghost to be very haunting even if they were being haunted by it.

Why wasn’t the ghost scary, you children ask? Because the ghost was just a tall, serious-looking man who was dressed up in fancy clothes like a soldier from long ago. And it never said anything scary or did anything scary whenever it visited Young Calvin, either. As a matter of fact, it just sort of stood there and stared at Calvin, night after night, visiting the boy whenever he had settled into a comfortable slumber.

But no, it didn’t stop there, my inquisitive wee ones. The ghost appeared to Calvin when he was awake, too. Of course, Calvin was the only one who could see the ghost and nobody ever listened to Calvin whenever he started babbling about the spectral soldier man who followed him everywhere.

Nobody listened to Calvin anyway because he always looked sickly, like he might be deaf or something, so most folks considered him a waste of their time, which didn’t help Calvin with his ghost problem.

What terrified Calvin most about the ghostly soldier was not its bloodshot, never-blinking stare, or the rows of perfect ivory-white teeth that were constantly visible on the soldier’s lipless countenance, or its perfectly groomed, extensive, and intimidating beard. Nor was it the wooden gun that hung over the soldier’s shoulder, for this gun was just for show and it had no functioning firing mechanism of any kind. Plus, the soldier never carried any bullets for it.

Indeed, Calvin could accept all of these things, but what frightened him the most about the ghost was this one silly thing – no matter how closely he dared to scrutinize the soldier’s strange uniform, Calvin could never figure out what army the spectral man belonged to.

And of course the soldier never divulged where its allegiances lay. Was it French? Was it Irish? Was it Turkish? Or was it some silly band’s drum major and not a soldier at all? Calvin never knew because the soldier never spoke. Not that Calvin ever had the guts to ask it anything anyway.

As the years went by, Calvin allowed the soldier to affect every aspect of his life, the terrible umbrella of fear that he lived under causing him to neglect his studies, to curb his enthusiasm for slaughtering New World natives, and eventually leaving him with no friends, no loved ones, and none of the necessary skills to earn a decent living.

Soon enough, Calvin was in his late twenties, alone, unmarried, and penniless. The penniless part wasn’t so bad because pennies hadn’t been invented yet, kiddies, but my point is that all day, every day Calvin got nothing important or productive accomplished.

Half of the townspeople considered Calvin to be a lazy idiot; the other half thought he was insane. All of them assumed that he was an artist. Whenever he was asked, Calvin referred to himself as a “freelance frontiersman.” This was a fairly accurate description because sometimes Calvin did explore the dense forest on the eastern edge of the colony, though mostly Calvin just explored his own body, usually in the dense forest on the eastern edge of the colony.

By the way, you young childs who always try to run away from me, this is a fine and beautiful way to live and don’t you begrudge Calvin or myself for living this way.

Now one day, while foraging in the woods for nuts and berries, as was Calvin’s primary means of nourishment, he stumbled upon a rather exquisite and intriguing log. And since he had literally stumbled upon it, he was in a significant amount of pain for the next few minutes.

During Calvin’s subsequent cursing and hopping about, he forgot all about the above-mentioned mysterious and awe-inspiring log, and I suggest that you do likewise, foolish children, for that fantastic and valuable log has nothing to do with the rest of this story.

Sorry, that’s how stories go around here.

However, Calvin did notice another log nearby, this one much smaller and less mystifying than the other one, though it will be very important for the remainder of the story. Perhaps the log was a magical log, perhaps it was due to the handful of mushrooms he had eaten early that morning, or perhaps I am making this part up to make this story more interesting and less believable, but when Calvin looked at that log, he saw an image of the spooky spectral soldier peering back at him as if the soldier were being held captive inside the log.

The expression on the soldier’s face, though just as unreadable and unchanging as it ever was, seemed somehow pitiful to the sensitive Calvin. For whatever inexplicable reason, Calvin felt that he was responsible for putting the soldier in the log and vowed to himself and a nearby family of woodchucks that he would set the soldier free.

So the young man hefted the worm-eaten and beetle-infested log onto his shoulders and carried it back to the tiny shack that was his home, which once served as a clubhouse for some children who had all gotten mauled by bears. Bears mauled children all the time back then, and they still do, so don’t you kiddies go asking your parents for little bears as presents for your birthday or Christmas.

And yes, I’m talking about teddy bears, before any of you twits ask, and I’ve got a whole bag of them right over there.

So…Calvin set about carving the soldier out of the log, using the dull, flimsy knife that his uncaring parents had left sticking out of his chest when they up and abandoned him for dead all of those years ago. And although Calvin knew nothing about whittling or carpentry, he sat at that log and toiled for the magical biblical number of forty days and forty nights, making a huge mess, cutting himself many times all over his body, and slowly learning that a knife works best when you hold it by its handle and do all of the cutting with its sharpened metallic half.

Soon enough, the log had been transformed into a rough, sloppy semblance of the phantasm soldier of his dreams, complete with fuzzy hair and a beard fashioned from moss, boots colored with charcoal, and a fancy red uniform the color of cranberry juice, which was painted with cranberry juice.

Calvin even fashioned a tiny gun to strap across the soldier’s back. This gun had a real working firing mechanism and fired tiny bullets that were the size of sand granules.

Calvin took an instant fancy to his creation, perhaps an unhealthy one, as does any being, omnipotent or not, who creates something, whether that something be a new self-aware form of life, a unique money-making religion, or a terrible, disheartening  children’s story.

Now this was where the real strangeness began, children, for now that Calvin had the mysterious soldier under his control in this light, handheld, and wooden form, he wasn’t so scared of him anymore.

Indeed, within a week, Calvin was treating the small soldier statue like an old senile friend or younger retarded brother - discussing his day with it, staring at the dirt for hours with it, and taking it swimming in the large hole that he always pretended was a water-filled pond. About the only thing that Calvin didn’t do was find out any details about the strange soldier ghost person thing, for no matter how much he tried to coax it to speech, the statue would not talk.

Now for as long as he could remember, which was usually about three weeks’ worth of memories, Calvin had a deal with a man named Cookie the Pirate, a surly burly man who munched on raw garlic, punched crippled children, and hunched over the same greasy table every night at Mickey McMickey’s Tavern. This deal was simple: If Calvin would come into the tavern from time to time and allow Cookie to belittle him in front of the other fellows there, Cookie would not pummel Calvin as often as he would like to, which meant he pummeled Calvin every other day.

Cookie was a rowdy, uneducated, and ugly fellow, and, contrary to his name, he was not really a pirate. Pirates sail around the world and look for children to bury alive in their treasure chests.

I myself am a pirate, you know, my sweet young ones.

But back to the story…Let’s just say that Calvin really enjoyed staring at dirt. One particularly dull night, Calvin was walking across town from one patch of moonlit dirt to another when he stopped by McMickey’s Tavern out of habit, forgetting all about the wooden soldier statue that he happened to be toting around.

The tavern was packed that night and everyone stopped talking and turned to see who had come in. When they saw that it was Calvin, they turned in unison toward Cookie’s table because they were all conditioned like dogs to respond in such a manner.

At that exact moment, it was Cookie the Pirate’s turn to shuffle the playing cards, and he jumped at the opportunity to distract everyone with a hearty taunting. Cookie didn’t know how to shuffle cards, you see, and that is why he was such an absolute bastard throughout his entire life.

            Calvin instinctively approached Cookie’s table and before he knew what was going on, Cookie had shoved his thick arm out and grabbed the statue out of Calvin’s slippery hands. Calvin suddenly realized where he was and what was happening to him, and more importantly, to his soldier buddy. If either wanted make it out of McMickey’s Tavern in one piece, he had to be careful.

“What’s that you got here, Calvy? A bonny new dolly for yourself to diddle with,” Cookie screamed, spraying beer and spittle all over the soldier statue.

“Bonny?” Calvin asked.

“It either means ‘pretty’ or ‘sexy.’ I’m not sure which. All the pirates say it, I think,” Cookie answered, feeling a little sheepish for not studying his pirate vocabulary book a little more closely.

            “Pretty or sexy you say? Well, then, no, it’s no doll at all, Cookie,” Calvin meekly said, and spying a bowl of beer nuts at the end of the bar, he defiantly added, “It’s a thing to crack nuts with. A…nut…cracking…man!”

            All of the men in the bar looked at Calvin quizzically, especially Cookie, for he had not been paying attention to what Calvin had just said and he didn’t want anyone to know this.

You see, ignorant children, in order to crack tough nutshells back in those days, men had only four options available to them: using their teeth, setting the nuts on fire, placing the nuts on a flat surface and punching them, or simply giving up and eating something that didn’t have a shell surrounding it.

“A nut what?” came Boris Clammelcutty’s hoarse voice.

“A nutcracker?” asked Tomsy Wallace from another table, his voice cracking embarrassingly at precisely the moment when he didn’t want it to.

 “Yes! A nuts-cracker! You can call him whatever you like,” Calvin said. “Just let me have him back and I’ll prove it!”

Cookie the Pirate studied the statue and hesitated to return it.

Suddenly, a miserable and lonely future without his little wooden soldier pal flashed before Calvin’s eyes. At this, he reached down into himself and pulled out his first and only ounce of bravery. Snatching the wooden man from Cookie the Pirate’s grimy hands, Calvin marched over to the bowl and removed a walnut at random from the pile of its identical brethren.

With a hundred drunken, bleary eyes watching his every move, Calvin placed the walnut on the bar and lifted the statue high above his head. He didn’t like the thought of smashing the nut’s shell with the soldier’s well-chiseled face, but he had little choice.

“Here we go,” Calvin weakly said.

He brought the statue down upon the nut with much force, but the nut prevailed. After two more solid whacks, the walnut was freed from its prison and the statue had a few new dents in its surface.

Chaos ensued, the men rushed Calvin, and the statue was lost in a sea of hands and elbows and noses. When the air cleared, Calvin could see that Cookie had the statue once again in his grimy clutches. Things quieted down as suddenly as they had begun.

“That’s wonderful, Calvin, but why a wooden man and not something sensible like a spiked club or mallet,” asked General Bobbing from a nearby chandelier.

“Because it’s for children,” Calvin blurted, gasping in terror as soon as he said it.

“Oh, that makes sense,” chimed in Good Danny Bonefisher from the floor where he had been trampled. “They’d hurt themselves with a club or mallet! But never a wee soldier man!”

“And look at his little suit! He looks so fancy,” gushed Robert Harold James from over Cookie’s shoulder.

“I DON’T BUY IT!” roared a gruff voice in the back of the sweaty crowd.

The voice belonged to Cowsteer Gorkson, a man who doubted everything in the entire world, especially things that he did not understand. In this case, however, he had a good reason to voice his skepticism.

“What’s not to buy?” Robert Harold James asked, making Cookie uncomfortable by licking his ear a couple of times.

“I’m not selling anything,” Calvin yelped.

“Who’s to say that the children won’t wop each other over the head with the bloody thing? It’s not safe,” Cowsteer said. “Make it child-proof and I might buy my kids some of those nutcrackers for Christmas this year. Otherwise, I was going to get them some spiked clubs and mallets.”

That’s one detail I forgot to mention when I started telling this story: Back then, people celebrated Christmas whenever a majority of the townspeople felt like doing it, and even though it was mid-September when all of this took place, for weeks there had been a vague feeling in the air that Christmas would be celebrated soon. This weighed heavily on the men’s hearts, for it was their responsibility to waste their hard-earned money and provide the presents so they could perpetuate the grand lie that is known as Christmas for yet another season.

“I’ve got it, boys,” announced Doctor Tasso from behind the bar, where he was removing Plato the Bartender’s foot because of a hangnail. “Perhaps we could make the little fella’s arm move back and forth so when you put the nut in between the arm and the body, it cracks the shell that way!”

“Nah, there’s not enough leverage that way,” mumbled Felix Heno, the town astronomer, who liked to think that he was also a physicist. “You’d never break a shell like that. Not even a filbert!”

“You guys can’t go chopping him up like that,” screamed Calvin, but everyone thought he was talking about poor Plato’s foot removal surgery and they minded their own business on that one and continued with the present nutcracker discussion.

“What about the space between his little legs,” Tooter Boyles suggested.

“Yeah! You could crack the nuts by squeezing the legs together,” agreed Gunther Hams, Tooter’s Siamese twin sister.

“I could never sanction such a toy to be made in such a way,” warned Father Vernina, the town barber and pastor. “Especially since it will be for children, especially since it will be used around the time of our Savior’s birth, and especially since it makes my sacred loins hurt to think of things like that.”

Calvin couldn’t believe his ears or his eyes or anything else that he usually believed in situations like this. Slowly, he inched closer to the dumbfounded Cookie’s monstrous frame, getting within reach of his precious statue.

Suddenly, Charlie Fork, the town puppeteer, jumped onto a table and announced that to help speed along the process, he could have a number of identical prototype statues with a variety of nut-cracking mechanisms attached to them ready to be tested at the tavern by the following evening. All he needed was once last glimpse at the nutcracker’s design and he could get started.

When Calvin heard this, he sprung and nabbed the nutcracker from Cookie’s hands and bolted out the door, but not before Charlie Fork could catch his last glimpse.

Calvin fled back to his shack before anyone could catch him. Nobody caught him, of course, because no one was chasing him. The men in the bar were all too drunk and they forgot about the whole nutcracker ordeal a few seconds after Calvin passed through McMickey’s crooked doorframe.

That is, except for Cookie, who would have forgotten about it within a few minutes if he hadn’t found a tiny wooden rifle floating in his beer. And even then, he still would have forgotten about the nutcracker in an hour if he hadn’t shot himself in the nose with one of those tiny bullets.

Rubbing his slightly irritated nose and making it all the more irritated, Cookie decided then and there to pay Calvin a visit the next day.

Back in his frosty little shack, Calvin jogged his short-term memory, recalling all of the men’s cruel tauntings, most of their suggestive phrasings, and some of their sarcastic sneerings.

They’ve got some nerve telling me how to improve my nutcracker, he thought. It’s not even a nutcracker! Nor is it some kind of child’s play-toy! It’s a soldier. Even more, it’s a man. And, dare I say, it’s even a person!

An idea quickly wormed its way through Calvin’s skull and pierced his brain like the deadly idea worm that navigates its way through the skull of its prey and rots its brain with load after load of putrid, tainted droppings. By the way, children, these filthy idea worms are crawling all over this miserable city, mostly in the very beds that you’ll all foolishly sleep in tonight.

So our man Calvin’s idea was this: To allow the statue speak for itself, so that it might divulge its identity and purpose not only to the rowdy and doubtful fellows in McMickey’s Tavern, but also to its confused and shamed creator, Calvin.

Feverishly Calvin carved into the night, into the nut-cracking soldier, and into himself. Eight hours and two pints of blood later, the statue had a mouth that would open and close whenever Calvin pulled a little handle on its back up or down, respectively. Of course, whenever Calvin opened the mouth, no sound came forth, for it was just a chunk of wood.

However, Calvin could make the statue appear to talk by changing his own voice and talking for it.

Thus it was that the nutcracker came to speak its first word, which was, “Ahem!”

“Whoa! You’re finally talking to me,” Calvin exclaimed.

“Yes.” There was an awkward pause as Calvin thought of what to say next to himself. “Thank you, Sir Calvin, for freeing me from that log and giving me the ability to speak!”

“You’re welcome,” Calvin shyly replied. “So what is your name?”

“There’s no time for that, young man! You must return me to the tavern at once!”

“No time to tell me your name?” Calvin asked, upset at himself for answering his own question like that.

“Correct! No time! To the tavern! For the children!”

“Calm down, please,” Calvin pleaded with the soldier. “I will take you to the tavern if you wish, but the tavern is far away and we could at least continue our discussion on the way.”

“Nonsense! Silence!”

Calvin didn’t appreciate being ordered around by his little buddy. He also knew that he couldn’t bring the nutcracker to Mickey McMickey’s Tavern because it wasn’t open that early in the morning, but he didn’t have the heart to tell the nutcracker this.

Attempting one last time to change his own mind, Calvin said, “But the others there will make fun of you…me…us.”

            “Let them have their fun,” the nutcracker quickly replied in its high, tinny voice.

            Calvin’s heart sank.

            “Calvin Trifles, you are helping me fulfill my destiny while also fulfilling your own!”

            Calvin had never thought about fulfilling his destiny before.

            “What destiny is that?”

            “Why, feeding all the poor, hungry children of the world who cannot open their nuts on their own!”

            Anger and jealousy rose up in Calvin like the liquor-saturated contents of my stomach sometimes rise up in my throat after I’ve drank too much whiskey. The fingers of one hand loosely wrapped around the nutcracker’s neck while the other hand continued to work the mouth handle.

            “But I don’t care about those children.”

            “Aye, and neither does anybody else in the world, including me, for children are all worthless and nasty,” shouted the nutcracker. And indeed, it had never spoken truer or more poignant words, children.

            There was a silence.

            “Then why-” began Calvin.

            “Because it is my destiny, you fool,” he interrupted himself in the nutcracker’s voice.

            At this point, Calvin felt like his head was spinning more than it usually did. Love and hatred and confusion and clarity battled like invisible, abstract soldiers in his mind. Eventually, Love stabbed hatred through the back, burned Confusion as it ran, and strangled Clarity with its own intestines.

With little to no forethought about what he was doing, Calvin moved his face closer to the nutcracker’s face, his lips closer to the splintery spots where the nutcracker’s lips would be if it had any.

With lightning speed, the nutcracker’s sharp teeth had spread and chomped down on poor Calvin’s puckered lips as if they were delicate leaves of fresh spinach.

If you don’t like violence, kiddies, I suggest you cover up your ears at this point. However, if you do that, it might convince me to hurt you later, even though I’ve already decided to do that regardless of what you do or say.

So Calvin was being bitten by his very own creation, one of his arms flailing about uselessly and the other very clearly controlling the nutcracker’s movements. Suddenly, the nutcracker jerked back and took both of Calvin’s lips with it, leaving Calvin with a permanent and painful skeleton grin of teeth and blood.

Before Calvin could respond, either in his own voice or in the nutcracker’s, the nutcracker was upon him again, this time gouging out mounds of flesh around his neck, severing several important veins and vessels and other things that had blood in them.

Calvin fell to the ground, the nutcracker following and landing face-to-face with the boy, who was quickly bleeding to death.

            Somehow, Calvin hadn’t rendered his own voice-box useless in the scuffle and he mentioned to croak out one last response, “Oh nutcracker soldier, I’m finished. Please answer me this one question that has haunted me forever.”

            “Ok, Calvin,” the nutcracker whispered.

            Calvin’s head was getting light and his vision fuzzy, but he was able to concentrate enough to ask his final question.

“What army do you belong to?”

There was a short pause.

            “I belong to no army, silly boy. I merely like to dress fancy and this is the only outfit I own. Now close your eyes, gentle giant, and fulfill your destiny, which is that of all men…to die.”

            These touching words, barely intelligible because they came from his own mangled mouth, were the last to pass through the ears of Calvin Trifles. Minutes later, Cookie the Pirate showed up and found Calvin dead and the nutcracker abandoned.

            Laughing and grabbing the new and improved nutcracker, Cookie ran back to McMickey’s Tavern and waited around for the doors to open like he did every day. Hours later, Cookie was sitting at his table with nothing to do but wait for all of the other men to get off work, which he also did every day.

            Soon enough, everyone was there and Cookie brought out the nutcracker for all to see. When Charlie Fork saw Cookie’s nutcracker, he threw all of his identical prototype statues up in the air in dismay.

            “It’ll never work,” Felix Heno snapped

            Plato limped over with a pecan and placed it in the nutcracker’s gaping mouth. Cookie brought the handle down hard and pulverized the nut within.

“Oh my! Look how the shell is cracked in one swift stroke and the pieces of nut fall rather neatly out of his mouth,” exclaimed Doctor Tasso.

            “It looks like he’s vomiting out the nut pieces all over the place,” remarked Mark Pigsley, the town butcher.

            “The little buggers ought to love that,” said an unimportant fellow somewhere in the crowd.

            “Let’s have a test with the children, the children!” Doctor Tasso screamed, jumping through a window and cutting himself badly.

            Immediately, the men rounded up some dirty, unloved street urchins and presented the nutcracker and bowl of nuts to them. Immediately, they began using the nutcracker to crack nutshell after nutshell, voraciously gobbling up the only food that many of them had seen in weeks. Some ate the shells, too. Some swallowed the nuts whole without even glancing at the nutcracker.

            “They absolutely adore it,” Father Vernina beamed. “The church shall endorse these nutcrackers and that means from here unto eternity, they shall be an American tradition. I’ll even package them up with the birth of Christ. How’s that sound?”

            Everyone agreed with Father Vernina because they pretty much had to and Cookie the Pirate was congratulated for inventing the nutcracker. There was a huge demand for the nutcracker toys that Christmas and Cookie the Pirate, who later became known as Cookie the Prison Guard, died a very happy and successful man who had many good wives who gave him whatever he needed whenever he needed it.

And there ye have it, my young ones, the Tale of the Origin of the Legend of the First Nutcracker. Of course, my story was stolen long ago by a ballerina I dated and it has since been summed up in the ballet known as The Nutcracker. I urge you all to resist seeing and supporting this production as you grow up because it’s not fair to me, it’s not fair to Calvin Trifles, and it’s not fair to the real first nutcracker, who I can now safely reveal to you is none other than…myself!

Yes, I am the first nutcracker and I would appreciate if you would please honor my memory by placing some nuts, preferably out of their shells, in my mouth. I am the true meaning of Christmas and I am also the reason for the season. Thank you all very much and now it is time to die.