Nutcracker display lights up north Ballard for its ninth year

The Nutcracker display—arguably one of the best holiday displays in the city— is back this season at 9016 Loyal Ave NW for its ninth year.

Ballardites John Carrington and Scott McElhose have been carrying on the tradition since 2015, when Carrington, a harpist in the Pacific Northwest Ballet Orchestra, acquired the 15-foot-tall Nutcracker figure from a ballet colleague.

“It was My Ballard that gave me the idea for the genesis of this display,” Carrington said. He’s referring to this post from 2009 when the Nutcracker was displayed at his former colleague’s house on 90th and Dibble.

Carrington became friends with the ballet colleague who owned the figure, and bought it from them to start his own collection.

In 2015, after the ballet retired the Sendak production and put the figures into storage, Carrington decided to add new pieces to his collection.

Carrington had to ask for community support to keep the tradition going in 2020, when the pandemic caused his work to slow to a trickle. His neighbor launched a GoFundMe campaign to help cover the costs of lighting the display, which surpassed the goal and allowed Carrington and McElhose to keep the display alive.

“It was an amazing outpouring of community support and generosity that gave me hope for the future that things would work out in a time of anxiety and uncertainty,” Carrington said.

Carrington restored the animatronics on two of the figures, which he says hadn’t been working since their original 1983 debut as a window store display. The Mouse King now waves his sword, and the Nutcracker crunches his mouth. Carrington also commissioned for the Nutcracker’s face to be repainted.

There are a few additional characters in the display as well: Carrington added a figure from Where the Wild Things Are, “looking down from the roofline much as Sendak had it appear in his Nutcracker Act II opening boat scene where the monster was peering over the mountains,” he said.

Photos courtesy John Carrington