THE NUTCRACKER

New York City Ballet at New York State Theater, Lincoln Center, (212) 870-5570. “Nutcracker” plays through Jan. 4.

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FEW holiday traditions are more typically New York than New York City Ballet’s staging of the Balanchine/Tchaikovsky “The Nutcracker” at Lincoln Center’s New York State Theater.

These days, of course, every ballet company you’ve ever heard of – and quite a few even I haven’t – is offering some kind of “Nutcracker.”

But with City Ballet, enlivened and embellished with the students of its own School of American Ballet, there seems a special, almost imperial rightness.

This, the staging and the company seem to suggest, is the way “The Nutcracker” should be done. And, by and large, it is.

This year’s edition looked as Christmassy, as snow-flaky and as festive as ever.

The performance I caught featured a lissome Miranda Weese – who appeared completely recovered from injury – as the Sugar Plum Fairy, and the company’s newest principal from the Dutch National Ballet, the French-born Sofiane Sylve, radiantly outgoing as the Dew-Drop Fairy.

But whatever cast you see – and it changes performance to performance – rest assured it has Balanchine’s footprint on it.

The company is giving 45 performances of “The Nutcracker” through Jan. 4, after which it moves into eight weeks of standard repertory.

Interestingly, during a year-long celebration of the centennial of George Balanchine’s birth, City Ballet will present all three of the full-evening Tchaikovsky classics: “Swan Lake,” “The Sleeping Beauty” and “The Nutcracker.”

But the latter is the only one actually choreographed by Balanchine himself and ever since February 1954 it has held a special place in City Ballet’s life and history.