Crossing the open farmland of southwestern Minnesota, you’ll encounter an otherworldly sight: a massive head with a beard, mustache and red-striped top hat looming over the horizon. Pull into the small town of Luverne and the figure — a nearly 66-foot (20-metre) tall nutcracker, decked out like Uncle Sam — comes into full view. Luverne, which, thanks to a local collector claims to have more of the decorative figurines than people, now boasts the world’s tallest nutcracker too. And yes, the star-spangled behemoth has a working jaw. Outside a quirky rock shop in the town’s centre, hundreds of people gathered for a weekend ribbon cutting where the nutcracker’s name and exact height were revealed to a crowd that was later served red, white and blue cookies and slushies. “Please welcome our newest Luverne resident, Verne the Patriot,” Katie Walgrave announced to cheers. It stands 65 feet and 7 1/2 inches tall, with the pedestal pushing Verne an additional nine feet (2.7 metres) over the surrounding prairie, according to Walgrave. That’s almost twice the height of a 33-foot (10-metre) tall nutcracker in Neuhausen, Germany, that Guinness World Records currently has ranked as the largest. Walgrave, who runs the rock shop called Those Blasted Things with her family, said that since the nutcracker was completed in mid-June, customers have quadrupled. Other local businesses have reported more traffic too. “Our goal is to have something that’s different and that you won’t see anywhere else. And so that’s what we have here,” she said. Given the association between nutcrackers and Tchaikovsky’s namesake holiday ballet, the July unveiling seemed a bit out of season. But nutcrackers are a year-round obsession in Luverne, which also hosts a ‘Nutcracker Fest’ every summer.  It all traces back to Betty Mann, 96, and a trip that she made to a Cracker Barrel in January 2001 after her daughter and husband had recently died. “I said to my daughter-in-law, ‘I had a hard Christmas and I’ve always wanted a wooden nutcracker. I’m buying myself a belated Christmas present’,” she recalled. She got her first in the Cracker Barrel’s gift shop. She kept buying them, and Mann’s collection eventually ballooned to more than 2,500 nutcrackers. In 2016, she donated them to the town’s historical society, where she was president, hoping to draw more visitors to its museum. Others also started donating and today, Luverne’s 7,554 nutcrackers outnumber its roughly 5,000 residents. No two are the same. A city committee came up with the idea of building the world’s tallest nutcracker, and so Verne was conceived. It was timed perfectly to arrive as the nation celebrates its 250th anniversary.