Artisan nutcracker craftsman Glenn Crider is not Santa Claus, and his home in Mechanicsville is no North Pole. But he does have A) a white beard, B) a Christmas-bursting, wonder-filled workshop tucked into his garage, and C) a certain magic about him.
And though his workshop may be a humble garage, when stepping inside, the sense of nostalgic charm of childhood Christmases and long-forgotten glee of a freshly made toy surrounds at once. Along one wall, wooden balls and cylinders wait—the heads and arms of future nutcrackers already taking shape. A dusting of pink marks cheeks-to-be, and the tapered end of a billet hints at a cuff.
Across the room, a retinue of little wooden men is spread out in various stages of completion. Some bodies balance on legs, some heads rest on torsos. Some are painted up to the chin, others are just missing pupils in the eyes. Even unfinished, all feel very much alive—easy to imagine in the arms of a dancing child or standing proud on a mantelpiece for decades to come.
On the walls, the story unfolds in sketches, blueprints, and clippings from newspapers and magazines documenting Glenn’s long trajectory as a craftsman. It started with clocks.
Self-Taught Santa Claus
In his 20s, those self-taught skills found a direction in clockmaking. “I became a clockmaker in the late ’70s,” he explains. After learning the basics from an older mentor, he bought the man’s leftover machines and kept teaching himself. “So I taught myself how to make a nutcracker.”
At the library—“this was before the internet”—he searched for German nutcracker makers in the U.S. “There was zero,” Glenn says. “And there still is zero—besides me.”
Nutcracker-making, he explains, demands both the logical and the artistic—the ability to master both engineering precision and creative soul. “I don’t know if God gave me that,” he says, “but I can take a clock apart, put it back together, make it run—and I can also paint the Sistine Chapel.”
Once he realized nutcrackers were within reach, Glenn expanded to other German folk crafts: incense smokers puffing from “o”-shaped mouths—called räuchermänners—schwibbögen arches, pyramids, carousels, ornaments—a whole Santa’s sack of treasures fit for an old-world toymaker.
Meanwhile, Glenn’s analytical side carried him into a six-figure career in IT, while his Christmas craftwork continued as an after-hours passion project. Then, in 2006, came a mysterious commission for four special nutcrackers. Later, he learned they were destined for the 2008 U.S. Postal Service holiday stamps—now collector’s items, and an unexpected boon for his craft. Things were going well in and out of the workshop.
Then, in 2009, at age 55, Glenn was unexpectedly laid off.
This nutcracker is a prototype of the one once used in the Richmond Ballet’s performance of The Nutcracker.
This Ginger Cottage Christmas tree lot design moved a customer to tears at one of Glenn’s signing events. “I’m trying to touch your heart when I make a design,” he says.
Christmas Year-Round
“It’s a shock when you lose your job—suddenly, in your 50s,” Glenn says. “You think, ‘Are we going to lose everything?’”
Overqualified for available positions, with his wife Diana’s salary barely covering basics, Glenn still had a secret skill and a constantly working mind churning out designs. They started TRC Designs (short for “Three Ring Circus”), showing at craft fairs until a second-year creation—tiny wooden Ginger Cottages—changed everything.
The head buyer for Cracker Barrel, the giant chain of restaurants and gift stores, went into a store where they happened to be selling Glenn’s products, saw a Ginger Cottage on the shelf, and followed the breadcrumbs to find TRC Designs.
“That’s a really funny story,” Glenn says. “Made in the USA—for what I do—is almost impossible. The buyer responsible for Christmas didn’t want to buy my product. She said it was too expensive—she could buy the same thing in China for $2, and mine was $10. But her boss told her she had to buy it because it was Made in the USA.”
So, Cracker Barrel approached him in 2011 with a $1 million order. At the time, Glenn was a one-man operation with just one laser machine to carve designs into the wood. “I thought, ‘How am I gonna do this?’” Glenn recalls. Luckily, Cracker Barrel was committed to the American-made angle.
When they returned the next year, he took the order. He and Diana rented manufacturing space in King William, bought 10 lasers at $40,000 apiece, and shipped to Cracker Barrel in year three. “And then the company just took off,” Glenn says.
TRC created Christmas designs for the biggest names in holiday festivity: Biltmore Estate, Dollywood, Coca-Cola, Busch Gardens, and beyond. There were nutcrackers galore—a gardener for Lewis Ginter Botanical Garden, a purple-decked George Mason figure, countless Kris Kringles, even a self-portrait. Diana keeps the first of everything, from the 2008 stamp prototypes to Glenn’s first nutcracker, a Gepetto, filling their home with enough to form a toy army. “It’s Christmas year-round here,” she says.
After a decade, TRC had sold $14 million worth of product. In their 10th year, Glenn sold the Ginger Cottages brand to Old World Christmas, the nation’s largest holiday manufacturer. Production shut down, but Glenn stayed on, designing through the transition—first for two years, then ultimately for four. A fifth year was bound by non-compete.
A sampling of Glenn’s many Ginger Cottages. When placed over a light (like those on a Christmas tree), they reveal hidden wonders inside—mini cookies, gingerbread men, and Santas.
Santa guides his reindeer atop shelves of Ginger Cottages in Glenn’s workshop.
The Second Act
When that ended last October, Glenn stepped into his second act. This time around, he says, it’s smaller by choice—more focused, more controlled, and still committed to high quality. Instead of managing 25 employees and more than 1,000 sales reps, he now hand-picks the accounts he wants to work with, including The Christmas Shop on Williamsburg’s Duke of Gloucester Street.
“At the time, I wanted all the work I could get—if the phone rang, we said yes,” Glenn recalls. “Now it’s different. Now it’s about building a name for ourselves.”
True, he already found success and is now in his 70s, but Glenn explains, “We can retire, but I don’t want to just sit in a chair and wait for the Grim Reaper. I want to stay busy.”
His focus today is his new line called Christmas Traditions, intricate Bavarian-style ornaments made right in his home workshop in Mechanicsville, each full of surprises. That’s key for Glenn: “Since the very beginning, we’re always giving you more than you pay for. There are little secrets hidden in each one.” In his Ginger Cottages line, for example, a path up to the house would be full of gingerbread men, stockings, and snowmen, rather than just amorphous blob-shaped stones.
After all, it’s the details—the hand-placed special touches—that take an item from a forgotten decoration shoved to the bottom of a Christmas bin in the basement to a treasured, passed-down family heirloom.
Memories Made Miniature
Once, at a signing event (yes, that’s how big a deal Glenn’s Christmas creations are) in Pigeon Forge, Tennessee, a woman froze at the sight of a Ginger Cottage tree lot with a camper.
“She started crying,” Diana says, remembering it clearly. “She said, ‘You have no idea the memories this brings back.’” She hugged Glenn tearfully and explained her grandfather had run a lot just like it, complete with the little camper where he spent the night.
“Christmas means something to everybody,” Glenn says. “When you buy my product, I’m trying to rekindle a memory for you. That’s why people run up to me crying. That’s what motivates me.”
Because that purpose behind his work is what matters most, Glenn and Diana are always dreaming up new ways to surprise people with that same kind of powerful joy. Like the nearby Sam’s Hot Dog Stand on U.S. 31—Glenn headed into his workshop and fashioned a hot dog–selling smoking man with a wiener dog sidekick just for the owners. “They were blown away,” Diana says. “We love random acts of kindness. You never know where we’ll show up—you just never know. And that’s fun.”
One family from Midlothian used to come to Glenn’s open house every year when TRC would open its doors to show off all their products. Their two little girls would arrive dressed to the nines in Christmas attire and take pictures with Glenn. “They told us this was one of the highlights of their Christmas,” says Diana. “Each girl picked something, and they said, ‘We’ll have these for the rest of our lives.’”
“Because think about it—five years from now, you won’t remember the tie you gave your dad for his birthday,” Glenn adds, “but if you can reach in and stimulate a memory—that means something.”
As for Glenn, he knows what will be waiting for him in his stocking this year. A Lowe’s gift card from Diana, just like every year. And that’s fine by him.
“What strikes me is thinking about the thousands of people who’ll be receiving the things I’ve made,” he says. “That’s what makes Christmas.”
Glenn’s self-portrait nutcracker portrays him hard at work on the Christmas stamp designs.
This räuchermänner is one of Glenn’s master creations at about 18-inches tall. They’re also known as German smokers or incense smokers and are typically displayed with schwibbögens. This räuchermänner’s pinwheel actually spins.
Glenn’s extensive crafting repertoire includes schwibbögens, which date to 18th-century Germany and are used as a decorative candle-holder during the holidays.
This article originally appeared in the December 2025 issue.
