Christmas crackers

 

Christmas crackers

Image courtesy Wikimedia Commons

In my usual galumphing way, I didn’t appreciate that for some people ‘crackers’ would summon visions of small biscuits to be eaten with cheese. It’s yet another example of my rather parochial view of the world. I do remember at lunch many years ago my middle daughter asked if we had any crackers, and I was about to go upstairs to retrieve some, when I realised she was talking about biscuits for cheese.

So, what is a Christmas cracker, and why? Traditionally, it decorates the table on Christmas Day, when the company sits down to eat mounds of food for lunch – turkey, pigs in blankets, sprouts, bread sauce, roast potatoes, with ‘all the trimmings.’

A Christmas cracker is a cardboard tube covered in brightly decorated paper, twisted at each end to stop the contents falling out. Contained within are a paper crown, a motto or joke, a small gift, like a thimble or a tiny notebook, and a cracker or banger. The banger is made from two narrow strips of paper, attached with a slight overlap. The overlap is coated with gunpowder or a thin layer of a friction-sensitive chemical, like silver fulminate. When the cracker is pulled, to break it open, the friction causes a tiny explosion, a snapping bang, which the cardboard tube amplifies.

Each place setting has a Christmas cracker, and the tradition is to pull your cracker with your neighbour or someone opposite. At the same time, your opposite number is supposed to hold out his or her cracker and you both pull together. The person with the largest section of cracker wins the contents.

Hats are donned, jokes are read out and scoffed at, and little gifts are exclaimed over. The hat is worn until the meal is completed, and that can be quite a long time if there is a starter, a main course, pudding, and cheese and biscuits – or crackers!

Some people make their own crackers. As a tradition, it originates in Victorian times, as do so many British practices.

Tom Smith was a London confectioner who sold sugared almonds wrapped in twists of paper. Around 1845 he started including mottos with the almonds.They were frequently bought by young men for young ladies, so the mottos often took the form of love poems. Later, the paper twists became tubes to which Tom Smith added the ‘bang’ to make them more exciting, and almonds were replaced with small gifts. Tissue paper crowns were added by his sons in the early twentieth century, and the love poems were replaced with jokes or riddles.

   In Great Britain, under the provision of the Pyrotechnic Articles (Safety) Regulations 2015 people under the age of eighteen are not allowed to buy fireworks. An exception is made for Christmas crackers, which are classed as fireworks, but it is still illegal to sell them to children under the age of twelve.

Aviation authorities have different rules about Christmas crackers. Some countries, like the USA, ban them outright, while others allow them under certain stringent conditions. Homemade crackers are banned by all airlines.