A Christmas cracker is a cardboard tube wrapped in coloured paper with twisted ends. Two people take an end each, pull, and it comes apart with a small bang. Whoever gets the larger portion keeps the contents.
What is inside
Three things, always:
- A paper crown, folded flat, in tissue paper.
- A small plastic toy of no value whatsoever — a tiny screwdriver, a fortune-telling fish, a set of nail clippers that will not cut anything.
- A joke, printed on a slip of paper, which must be read aloud.
The jokes
Cracker jokes are famously, deliberately terrible, and their badness is the entire point. They are groaned at rather than laughed at, and reading one out is a small performance.
What do you call a boomerang that doesn’t come back? A stick.
Why did the turkey join the band? Because it had the drumsticks.
What’s orange and sounds like a parrot? A carrot.
The crown rule
This is the part visitors underestimate. The paper crown is put on immediately and worn for the entire meal. This applies to everyone at the table — grandparents, teenagers, the boss, the vicar, and any guest who thinks they might be exempt.
Taking it off before the pudding is finished will be noticed and quietly commented on. By the end of the afternoon the crowns are torn, slipping and worn at increasingly undignified angles, and photographs from every British Christmas look much the same as a result.
Tom Smith
A London confectioner who, around 1847, was trying to improve sales of French bonbons wrapped in twists of paper. He added a motto, then — the story goes, after watching a log spit in the fire — worked out how to add a bang.
The mechanism is a cracker snap: two overlapping strips of card with a small quantity of silver fulminate on one, which detonates from the friction as they are pulled apart. Smith’s son later replaced the sweet with a paper hat and a small gift, and the modern cracker was complete.
How to pull one
The convention is that everyone at the table crosses arms and takes a cracker end from the people on either side, forming a ring, and all pull at once. This is done before the food arrives and produces a satisfying volley of bangs.
The physics tip, if you want to win: hold your end firmly near the middle of the tube rather than at the very end, and pull steadily rather than sharply. The tube tends to tear where it is weakest.
The upmarket end
Luxury crackers from department stores contain proper gifts — silver, leather, jewellery — and cost accordingly. Some households make their own, filling them with better presents and jokes written by the family. Purists consider all of this to be missing the point, which is that the toy should be rubbish.