A Christmas memory

'Tis the season of "Nutcrackers," which means it's time once again for me to revisit the ghosts of Christmases past and my own complicated history with the ballet.

I don't remember the first time I went to see Balanchine's version of the Tchaikovsky classic at the New York City Ballet. But I do remember that every December for many years my Aunt Mary would take my sisters and me to see "The Nutcracker" at Lincoln Center's New York State Theater.

My sisters, Jana and Gina, would bring a pair of binoculars — not opera glasses, mind you, but the very same field glasses they took to Yankee Stadium — the better to ogle the male dancers. (As children, Jana and Gina always had an unusual take on culture, particularly Jana, who used to hide out in the Egyptian wing of The Metropolitan Museum of Art at closing time to see if the mummies would arise from their sarcophagi and who once threw a gum-wrapper into a Frank Stella sculpture at the Whitney Museum of American Art, mistaking it for a wastepaper basket. Today, she works for the federal government. Parents of the culturally challenged, I say to you: Take heart.)

Anyway, I too, was not above a little admiration of the male form. After "The Nutcracker," we'd all compare notes over hot-fudge sundaes at the old St. Moritz hotel. Those were good times.

The years went by, and so, too, did my sisters, to other cities and other lives. "The Nutcracker" became for my aunt and myself a duet in reverse. Where once she took me, I now took her, often in my capacity as a critic. And where I once blithely passed over the work — in the too-cool manner of teenagers, who find such stuff old-fashioned — I now appraised it with a more appreciative eye.

Far from being essentially a children's entertainment, "The Nutcracker" is a complex adult drama of transformation through love, with Tchaikovsky's richly symphonic score lending itself to all kinds of interpretations.

I can still see Gelsey Kirkland and Anthony Dowell in Mikhail Baryshnikov's Freudian version at The Metropolitan Opera House one May in the late 1970s. I still get a certain frisson from that spring performance.

"The Nutcracker" rightly, of course, belongs to the spare season. I haven't seen it in a number of years. But at Christmastide it still warms my imagination.