Last month I wrote about some holiday traditions I’ve enjoyed sharing with my grandkids. We start the season attending the annual Gingerbread Jubilee, a competition and fundraiser for our local performing arts center featuring magnificent sweet confectionary displays. Next, we head north to Portland to enjoy the brilliant light displays at Oregon Zoo’s ZooLights. Once we get closer to Christmas itself, my dining room table becomes a hub of creativity as big and little kids decorate sugar cookies with frosting and loads of sprinkles.

This year we added a new activity that I hope will join our other holiday traditions. A local ballet dance studio has been performing The Nutcracker in December for many years, but this was the first year I attended a performance. The last time I had attended a live performance of The Nutcracker was, I believe, sometime in the 1990s at Seattle’s Pacific Northwest Ballet Maurice Sendak-designed production with Sarah and her sister, Jenny. I figured this student production would not match the caliber of that professional experience, but I looked forward to this night out nevertheless. Daughter Sarah ordered our tickets, and we all convened at our local high school’s beautiful auditorium, where Studio Roxander put on several weekend performances throughout December.

I was a little skeptical as to whether both grandsons would really tolerate sitting through two acts of ballet (especially James, the 8-year-old). Sarah told me that the boys had, through their schools, had an opportunity to see portions of the ballet with their classmates the previous week and enjoyed it very much.

Over the years we’ve lived in the Rogue Valley, I had heard quite a bit about Studio Roxander,

whose founders moved here from the Bay Area in 2009, about the same time I arrived. David and Elyse Roxander’s ballet academy has developed an excellent reputation, and their two sons, one a soloist with American Ballet Theater and the other a principal dancer with the Philadelphia Ballet, are testaments to that training.

After seeing this performance, it is clear their skills as teachers stretch beyond their family to all of their students. Our program indicated the ages of the dancers range from 7 to 19 (although the parts of the mice and the young children at the party were played by their kindergarten-aged pupils), and aside from the dancers who performed Clara

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and the Snow Queen, I counted at least a dozen young ladies dancing en pointe.

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I was impressed by all the lead performers, including the young man dancing the part of the Nutcracker/Prince. The talent and precision of all the dancers left me in awe of their skill and dedication. In fact, everything about the production showed that Studio Roxander made every effort to create a magical, professional-level show, with the backdrops, set pieces and costumes beautifully executed.

Okay, so all of us adults were duly impressed and entertained by the ballet, but what about those boys? Well, I was delightfully surprised to see how much they were drawn in to the story and the performance, which lasted a little over two hours with an intermission. Touches of humor and some more modern references were sprinkled throughout the show, including early on, when Drosselmeyer’s apprentice attempts to perform some magic on his own, resulting in three Star Wars stormtroopers erupting from the toymaker’s cabinet, later shooed off by Drosselmeyer in a Darth Vader mask.

Yes, everyone in our party had a wonderful time, and The Nutcracker has made it onto our list of must-do holiday traditions.

— Patty Vanikiotis, associate editor/copy editor