The greatest holiday gift a surfer can give her family, aside from Kelly Slater’s sustainably unsustainable outerwear, is a gift to San Diego Academy of Ballet’s famed staging of The Nutcracker!

Get cultured.

It is, truly, the most wonderful time of the year. The world’s greatest surfer Kelly Slater knows it, gifting you with sustainably unsustainable mailed wish guides for his outerwear brand Outerknown. I know it too, though am gifting you something much better and longer lasting.

The opportunity to purchase tickets to a singular performance of the holiday classic The Nutcracker (if you so happen to live anywhere Southern California adjacent).

Now, you must by now be aware that I have fallen in love with ballet, staring at it through my young daughter’s eyes. The Italian to French art, made perfect in Russia, stretched in London and New York is an absolute revelation especially for a sloppy surf journalist.

Control, discipline, no quarter or room for kooks.

It is a scrupulous craft, one we should only be jealous of, one that has maintained its character through revolution, war, famine and high times too. One that has stayed entirely true to itself and I haven’t been able to turn away since seeing the world spin through my young daughter’s eyes as she sweated, cried, willed herself into dizzying pirouettes that would undo even the great 540ist Italo Ferreira.

Miraculously, I found an academy par excellence in San Diego, the prestigious San Diego Academy of Ballet and Ballet Theater, that teaches the near-perfect Vaganova method, for her.

Founded twenty years ago by the daughter of a dancer, a dancer herself whose own daughter regularly headlines performances. A rare family legacy that extends to the alumni. SDAB has sent dancers to the American Ballet Theater in New York, the Royal Ballet in London, the Bolshoi, the very best in the world, though was almost undone by Covid.

Ballet and Zoom don’t mix.

It miraculously survived, though, I miraculously found and now we are all, miraculously, around the corner from a presentation of The Nutcracker danced entirely by students and alumni.

Snow Queen an absolute vision. Sugar Plum Fairy to make you weep.

My young daughter dances four roles working Nat Young-esque hours to master.

I dance two. Mother Ginger, in drag with absolutely too many Bon Bons hiding under the folds of my skirt (1/5 of them pictured above), and a “Party Dad” surrounded by other “Party Dads” who each have children either featured or in the corps, who have been caught into something beautifully impossible but are trying to achieve anyhow.

Gift yourself, your family, a treat this holiday season.

Or just come witness this sloppy surf journalist spin.

I dare you.

Buy here.