The Nutcrackers are a family of gray squirrels who live in a big oak tree in Central Park, right in the middle of New York City.
Grandma Nutcracker is English. "Long before she became a grandmother, she left her home in London, England, to travel across the ocean in a doll's trunk, hidden under a doll's blue woolen blanket.
Most squirrels have poor memories but Grandma Nutcracker is different. She never forgets where she has stored her nuts and she likes to remember the English greenness and gardens and fogs and the exciting things that happened to her when she first arrived in New York.
It is this remembering that leads Grandma to sympathize with a homesick English girl who visits the park and draws pictures. But Grandma knows the girl will be sorry if she goes back to England and leaves the American boy who goes walking with her. For Grandma was happy with her American husband and she knows that "one place is surely very like another when you get used to it. But one person is not always like another."