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Disclaimer: This article is based on actual news from the real world – honestly! However, it has been sprinkled with a healthy dose of satire.
LUVERNE, Minn. — A town of roughly 5,000 people has spent about $600,000 to build the largest nutcracker in the world, not that there’s anything wrong with that. They call him Verne the Patriot. Verne is a nutcracker done up as Uncle Sam, red-striped top hat, standing 65 feet 7 1⁄2 inches tall. Guinness World Records has been asked to certify Verne as the tallest nutcracker on Earth.
Verne has a working jaw. Pressed on what the jaw does, a volunteer said “it cracks nuts,” maintained eye contact a beat longer than the situation required, and recommended we photograph the hat.
As with all great and overly-long small town stories, it all started with Betty Mann. In 2001, after some “hard” personal losses that imply great personal rage, she began collecting nutcrackers until she had 7,554 of them. In 2016, she gave more than 2,500 to the county historical society. It’s not clear what happened to the other 5054 of them, but so far there are no reports that any have become demon-possessed murdering automatons.
Shortly after, the town started wondering aloud whether it was sitting on something. It wasn’t, but they reached a different conclusion. “We’re crazy if we don’t utilize the nutcracker collection,” said Mayor Patrick Baustian, a sentence that could only have been uttered less than five times in all human history outside of an oddly specific fetish convention in Florida.
The town is betting that a Guinness record-breaking largest nutcracker in the world dressed like Uncle Sam will draw tourists off of nearby I90. There is nothing to be embarrassed about here. Luverne is proud of Verne, proud of Betty, proud of a collection that outgrew every shelf in town. Verne is just standing there being tall and structurally patriotic. This is all totally normal behavior for a rural town to undertake that isn’t under the thrall of a giant wooden Chthonic god hiding in plain sight. Or so they’d have you believe.
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