Ulbricht Mini Santa Nutcracker — 4 inch

There is something about the smallest Santas that I have never quite been able to explain. The big ones announce themselves — the seventeen-inch figures with painted cheeks and fur trim, the ones that claim a mantelpiece the moment you set them down. This one does not. This one is four inches tall, and he waits for you to find him.

He comes from Ulbricht's Seiffener Nussknackerhaus, which is the miniature end of the Ulbricht workshop, and what they have done with him is quiet and lovely. The whole figure is natural linden — pale wood at the face and legs, a dark stain at the cap and jacket, and a white beard that spills down to cover most of his chest. He holds a turned-wood Christmas tree in his right hand, stacked in tiers like something a child might have drawn, and a single gift in his left. The head is a little too large for the body, the way things are when they are made to be beloved rather than correct. And on the whole figure, there is only one bright color: the red-painted round of his nose. One spot of red in a whole world of natural wood. I noticed it before I noticed anything else.

I keep mine on the nightstand in my old bedroom at the Castle, next to the music box Drosselmeyer mended the winter I was nine. Some nights I forget he is there. Then I wake up, and the moon is on him, and the little red nose is the first thing I see.

— Clara Stahlbaum