As someone new to the whole thing that is the collective craze around North American Christmas traditions, this edition helps positioning The Nutcracker given is historical circumstances and the happenstances that led it to become such a big hit in the US. Reading both stories can feel slightly repetitive, but it can also be an interesting exercise to approach it as a game of "find the difference" in storytelling between Hoffman and Dumas, so the reader has the opportunity of finding out for themselves if Dumas really did water down the criticisms of the bourgeois child education strictness - as stated by so many literary critics.