That is nuts…

A few months ago, I stumbled upon a YouTube video of a tatty, giant nutcracker being refurbished by a woman to display outside of her shop. She purchased this 6-7ft plastic nutcracker from Facebook marketplace and made it look brand new.

This reminded me of how gorgeous the giant nutcrackers looked at my husband’s boss’s house every Christmas. He has two of them flanking the front door.

I started thinking that 2 nutcrackers would look great on our front porch, too, if I could only find some to refinish at a reasonable price (and by reasonable, I mean cheap).

I started scouring FB marketplace and I also asked my mom, and my two friends, Renee and Ann to keep their eyes peeled for some cheap nutcrackers. The ones I saw in the radius of our home were going for outrageous prices on FB. I couldn’t figure out why until Renee showed me a FB group that collects nutcrackers, many of whom repaint them.

What I discovered was that people all over the world were trying to get their hands on this certain nutcracker from Walmart. It was all white, and many were repainting it.

I explained to Jeff what I wanted to do, and he kindly volunteered to run into all of the Walmarts (yes, plural is correct, but it still sounds hillbillyish saying “Walmarts”) in our community to see if we could find at least one of the paintable ones.

After the 4th Walmart came up empty, I decided to go online to see if I could purchase them. I could not, but what I COULD do was see if they were available in the store. Imagine Jeff’s emotions when he found out after leaving the 4th Walmart that he didn’t need to go into all of those stores because I could easily see online that they were out of those nutcrackers.

Yeah…he wasn’t very happy with me for that….

I remember seeing on the previously mentioned FB group that one of the members found an ugly nutcracker at Big Lots, and it was for a much cheaper price than everywhere else.

We ventured over there, and Jeff scored 2 of the 72inch nutcrackers. He had to ask for the display to get a set. He received a lot of husband credit for that day’s adventure in shopping, I can tell you….

For the next couple of weeks, I repainted the bodies of those nutcrackers using the blues and whites of our house. When I was done, except for the touch-ups, my mom came over and painted over the hideous faces and made them look fantastic. Gone were the scary gums and dead looking eyes and in their place were friendly faces. My mom is an amazing artist.

While I was touching up the nutcrackers, before spray sealing them, one of the heads literally rolled off the counter and landed tooth first on the tile. (Yes, I made a head roll….) The poor fellow chipped his tooth, so I decided to give him a silver tooth instead. Most people won’t even notice it, but it makes me laugh.

I let the boys name our new “guardians.” Zach named his Wellington, and Tyler named his Chauncy. Wellington is the one with the fancy tooth.

I also need to mention is that these suckers light up and play obnoxious music when their motion sensors get triggered. This means that, once placed on the porch and turned on, they welcome any guest and hopefully frighten any unwanted animals (or people for that matter) with every trigger.  

We decorated the porch with them last weekend and added some other festive elements to complete the look.

The “other” elements were some greenery and giant jingle bells. Jeff had to go into Hobby Lobby TWICE for those (more husband credit).

On the first trip, I found the greenery that I wanted. When we put everything out on the porch, I realized the greenery was waaaay too small and needed another element to make it look complete. This means Jeff had to run into Hobby Lobby a second time, this time without me, to get the jingle bells.

This is how much that man loves his wife…He HATES shopping….

Once the set-up was completed. I took some photos to post on the nutcracker fb group to give other DIYers some ideas, like they had done for me.

What I was not prepared for was the response to that post. To date, I have received over 15,500 likes/loves and too many comments to count.

Since I am an encourager and try to show my appreciation, I have been responding to almost all of the comments. There have been a lot of questions about technique and about the colors I used. That sort of thing.

There are, of course, the rude people. My absolute favorite was the person who commented that nutcrackers creep her out. This is a NUTCRACKER FB GROUP, why would she be in that group if she hates nutcrackers. It just goes to show how people can look for a way to be negative, even when it doesn’t make sense.

Thankfully, most people were overwhelmingly positive. I don’t know what counts as viral, but for me 15,500 strangers seem “nuts” to me!