News

Steubenville’s giant nutcracker village might not be magic, but they’re bringing a downtown to life

By: Erin Gottsacker | The Ohio Newsroom
Posted on: Saturday, December 7, 2024

< < Back to news

STEUBENVILLE, Ohio (The Ohio Newsroom) — Days before Thanksgiving, Brodie Stutzman stood in his workshop considering a nearly finished nutcracker. Unlike the traditional mantel-topping toy, this one is almost as tall as he is.

He shook a bottle of spray paint before applying a regal pattern onto the figure’s red coat, then moved on to another nutcracker balanced upside down on its top hat.

“This nutcracker is an old one,” Stutzman said. “The legs broke off. This happens a lot every year.”

The toy’s repaired appendages stick straight up from its torso.

“Every one of these nutcrackers has something that I’m doing to it,” Stutzman said, gesturing to a room full of various toy parts.

Two freshly painted nutcracker arms dangle from the ceiling to dry. Nearby, a pair of the dolls stood ramrod straight, blank faces tilted upwards, awaiting a brush to paint bright eyes and mustaches onto their rosy cheeks.

“I’m just moving around trying to finish things up,” Stutzman said. “I’m still doing some painting on this one, doing some stenciling with that.”

When he’s done, these giant toys will line Steubenville’s main drag to create a unique holiday attraction: the Nutcracker Village.

How Steubenville’s nutcracker display came to be

Stutzman has been carving the nutcrackers for Steubenville’s holiday display for 10 years. Before that, the city’s Christmas celebrations were dramatically smaller.

“They had had a Christmas parade that had been poorly attended,” said Gretchen Nelson, Stutzman’s mother-in-law.

At the time, she remembers community leaders getting together to brainstorm ways to revive the city’s holiday celebrations. Jerry Barilla, now the city’s mayor, then the owner of a local appliance store, suggested decorating storefront windows with nutcrackers.

Nelson’s husband suggested scaling that idea up.

“We had a manufacturing company, and we primarily make religious art, but we make a lot of different things,” Nelson said. ”[My husband] is a woodworker, and so Mark was like, ‘What if we made big nutcrackers?’”

They decided to give the idea a try. The couple’s daughter created designs for the giant toys and they enlisted their son-in-law, Stutzman, to bring them to life.

That first year, he built 37 nutcrackers. The next year, he made 75.

Hand carving the giant toys

Stutzman handcrafts each jumbo nutcracker from scratch, starting with a 200-pound block of Styrofoam.

“We cut it into smaller blocks with this contraption,” he said. “It’s a hot wire cutter. As you can see, it moves back and forth and up and down. When it’s working, you can cut blocks, you can make them into cylinders, get rough shapes.”

Then, a wood lathe rotates the Styrofoam like a pottery wheel. As it spins, Stutzman uses a blade to give their toy bodies distinct shapes.

“You then sand it smooth and then you coat it in fiberglass with a brush,” he explained. “And then when that dries, you sand it [again] and that gets that final, complete version before you’re ready to paint it.”

Every year, he hand carves more nutcrackers like this, adding to the collection of more than 200 that are now on display in downtown Steubenville.

“It’s like an army of toys in the streets,” he said.

Some nutcrackers are traditional soldiers. Others are recognizable characters like Charlie Brown, Mary Poppins and the cast of the Wizard of Oz. This year, Stutzman is excited to introduce a new figure: Flick from A Christmas Story, complete with a tongue stuck to a flagpole.

Revitalizing Steubenville’s downtown

The army of nutcrackers has attracted national press. It’s been featured in the Washington Post, the Today show, People, Forbes and Wait, Wait…Don’t Tell Me!

And the attention has attracted swarms of visitors. Steubenville’s population barely skims 18,000 on a normal day. But last year, Nelson says five times that number of people descended on the city’s nutcracker village.

That scale of tourism is working wonders to revitalize the city’s streets, she said. Her family decided to invest in a building that had been mostly empty since 1970.

“The reason that we opened the coffee shop and the popcorn store and the Christmas store was because we saw the value in what was happening with the nutcrackers,” she said. “My husband felt like, ‘All right, we’ll just put our money where our mouth is and invest in the downtown.’”

Others followed suit.

“Ever since we started the nutcracker village, a pottery studio has opened, a cigar store has opened, the bookstore remained open,” Nelson said. A pizza place and Mexican restaurant moved in too.

“People need something unique in their city that’s not just a part of their job or their commute, something that gives their town character,” Stutzman said. “Steubenville has a lot of hidden character. We’re trying to expose that, and it brings more attention to the neglected parts of downtown.”

So while Steubenville’s giant nutcrackers don’t come to life themselves on these long December nights, they are breathing new life into the city’s streets.