The listing says: George Balanchine's The Nutcracker, Keller Auditorium. It doesn't say that Balanchine was the son of the Georgian composer Meliton Balanchivadze, that as a child he appeared in The Nutcracker on the Mariinsky stage where the ballet premiered in 1892, or that decades later in New York he staged his own version of Tchaikovsky's ballet. From 1954 on, that version made The Nutcracker a Christmas tradition in American theaters. For a reader who grew up with this music, a holiday show becomes an evening about someone who carried a piece of home across an ocean and changed this country's culture with it. Oregon Ballet Theatre dances the production in full, with the tree growing before your eyes and snowfall at the end of the first act. A good first ballet for a child, and music adults have known since childhood.