Every December the Hungarian State Opera stages The Nutcracker, and every December its gift shop has to sell something to the people coming out of it.

Everything else in this registry was bought by a company and given away. This one had to survive a harder test: somebody had to choose it, at a counter, with their own money, in the gap between the final curtain and the cloakroom queue. An opera gift shop is a difficult shelf. It is full of things that carry the house's name and have nothing to do with the performance anyone just watched, and the audience knows the difference between merchandise and a souvenir.

The Nutcracker is the one production where the merchandise problem solves itself, if you are willing to take the story literally. It is about a wooden toy soldier that comes to life on Christmas Eve. So the kit is a nutcracker soldier you build with your hands: a buildable toy of a toy, which is the only thing in that shop doing what the ballet is doing. It was made in alternating uniform colourways, red and navy, so a family did not go home with the same thing twice, and each one stands on a base plate carrying the Opera's own mark. The kit stays small and the packaging stays simple, a heat-sealed pouch, with the instructions behind a QR code rather than a printed booklet, because at retail the physical object has to justify its own shelf space. Alongside the retail kit, a much larger brick statue was built for display.