Nobody plans to become the “nutcracker lady.” Betty Mann certainly didn’t. The lifelong Luverne resident’s massive collection of holiday decorations started as a way for her to wrestle her life back into her own hands.
“In 2000, I lost my husband and my oldest daughter, and that Christmas was tough for me,” the now 93-year-old says. “That first Saturday in January 2001, I was in the Cracker Barrel in Sioux Falls, and everything Christmas was half-price. And I’d always wanted a wooden nutcracker.”
That first $6 Santa-shaped nutcracker became a talisman of Mann’s new life. Soon, there were hand-painted soldiers from Germany, a LEGO version made by her great grandson, and oh so many more.
“It just kind of exploded,” she says. Around the time her house started busting at the seams, the Rock County Historical Society started looking for a draw to spice up its tiny museum in Luverne. Mann, the org’s president, offered to donate her collection. Fast-forward a few years and a few thousand more nutcrackers, and Luverne has one of the largest collections of nutcrackers in the country.
5,821
Number of individual nutcrackers in the Rock County History Center’s collection—there are no duplicates! If someone accidentally donates a facsimile, the staff chooses one to sell in the year-round Christmas Haus gift shop. And while many represent the classic soldiers and kings of Nutcracker fame, others are dressed up as policemen, farmers, leprechauns, vampires, and even Yoda and Elvis.
788
The number by which nutcrackers outnumber actual citizens living in Luverne. “We have a billboard before our exit on I-90, and it says, ‘More Nutcrackers Than People’—that gets people to visit spur-of-the-moment,” notes Betty Mann.
600–700
Approximate number of monthly visitors to the Rock County History Center
2,500
Number of nutcrackers Mann had accumulated in 15 years before donating them to the Rock County History Center in 2016. Since then, others have donated collections (ranging in size from just a handful to more than 1,300) or gifted some to the center to beef up its numbers.
10,000+
Number of nutcrackers in the Guinness World Records’ largest collection, at the Nutcracker Museum in Vilnius, Lithuania—sorry, Luverne, you’ve got a ways to go!
8
Height, in feet, of the collection’s tallest nutcrackers (there are two)
73
Height, in feet, of the town’s future nutcracker statue, if all things go according to plan. “We want to start building the 8-foot base soon,” Mann (pictured) says. The statue would fully cement the town’s reputation as Minnesota’s nutcracker capital.
December 18, 2023
6:04 AM