Ulbricht Halloween Witch Nutcracker — Limited

Somewhere in the Castle, in a room that has no name, a door opens only in October.

She stands inside it. Twenty and a half inches. A black pointed hat with a wide brim, a green band at its base, and — look closer — a small gray spider resting on the crown. Long gray-white hair falls from beneath the brim on both sides. The face beneath is green. The eyes are yellow, shaped like a cat's. The mouth is the softest line of grievance. Christian Ulbricht's atelier limited this figure to 2,500 pieces, which is another way of saying: she was made slowly, and then she was stopped.

What a collector notices is not the color. It is the sleeves. A black spiderweb-patterned sheer overlay drapes the cape, and beneath it — only visible when the light moves — an iridescent teal-green metallic dress shifts in the shadow of the fabric. Two layers. One you see. One the light has to find. She holds a broomstick of bundled brown twigs in her right hand and a small black cauldron in her left, and the gray painted base beneath her feet has the weight of a stone floor.

She is not part of the Castle's Christmas rooms. She is kept in the October hall, the corridor between the library and the conservatory, where the light turns copper in the late afternoon. I visit her there. We do not speak. Silence, in her case, is a kind of hospitality. When she leaves the room in early November, I miss her the way you miss a weather pattern.

— The Snow Queen