Do you like crackers at Christmas?

Tweet

In the UK, crackers have been an integral part of Christmas dinner for the past hundred and fifty years or so, after they were invented (like many things) during the Victorian era. Traditionally they consist of a cylinder of paper or card tied near the ends with ribbon, with a ‘snap’ which goes off with a small ‘bang’ when the ends of the cracker are pulled apart. The cracker then falls apart and out comes some sort of treat or small novelty, a paper hat, often a crown shape these days, and a joke, motto or piece of trivia. We like crackers and they add to the decoration of the table as well as the festive spirit, but they seem to be getting worse and worse over time. Even the more expensive crackers usually only contain a useless trinket and a ‘crown’ that is more like a thin band of tissue paper, while the so-called jokes are always groan-worthy. Then of course there’s the issue of the unwarranted waste of paper/card and plastic ‘novelties’ which are often just thrown away. So how to reconcile these opposing aspects? Well we decided to make our own. Since we have a whole bag-full of card cylinders from inside toilet rolls, plus another bag of saved wrapping paper and plenty of ribbon, all we needed were some cracker snaps. These were easily found online – a pack of 120 for a pound or so. Then we had a trial run to make sure we could assemble them successfully. After that I found some small trinkets we would actually use (collected from Freegle) and wrote out the funniest two-line jokes I could find. The bonus feature was a small collection of tissue paper hats which originally came from crackers in the ‘old days’ (i.e. when my parents were young), when it seems that crackers actually contained proper paper hats. And then I used these to make a few crackers for our Christmas table. They were much more fun than the purchased sort and hardly generated any waste since I only used scrap paper, and the cardboard tube in the middle came out intact and could be re-used again anyway. I just need a bit more practice to make them look a little bit better.