Christmas Crackers History
How all the Christmas crackers were created and became a tradition.
In 1847, a confectioner named Tom Smith visited Paris and noticed how bon-bons were sold in a wax wrapper, instead of being sold openly on a tray as was the norm in Britain, in his city. He returned to Britain impressed and inspired and copied the idea of selling bon-bons in wrappers. This experiment of his became a success. Soon, on noticing that many men like to give these wrapped bon-bons to their partners, Smith began to include a love motto in his offer as well. He placed the motto between an outer covering and the waxed paper.
This idea became even more popular and Smith started registering great sales. But others in the business took inspiration from Smith and began selling similar stuff. Now, in order to be unique and different, Smith started including small little gifts like trinkets inside the wrapper also. But, this entailed an inclusion of a larger container. Smith selected small tubes for the purpose. This experiment also became a success. But, yet again, other confectioners copied it.
This led Smith to add something more to these gifts. One day, on hearing the pop sound made when a log was thrown into fire, Smith decided to add something similar to his gift wraps. He was able to invent a crackling mechanism soon which further gave novelty to his ‘bon-bons’. By dropping the sweet from the wrap and placing only a gift, Smith gave birth to what we now know as Christmas crackers. Like their father, Smith’s sons developed the cracker even further in later years to be ahead of the competition.
Christmas crackers make for great Christmas gifts. Though they are more popular in countries like UK, Australia, South Africa, Ireland and New Zealand, even United States is catching up and is increasingly seeing the usage of Christmas crackers as sweet little Christmas gifts.
Christmas crackers today
Nowadays, one can experiment with Christmas crackers in many ways. Using crackers that give you the option of placing a gift of your choice inside the wrap, you can create personalized Christmas crackers and include unique gifts in them. Some examples of little gifts that can be placed inside Christmas crackers are: pens, a small piece of chocolate, a small perfume bottle, a small bottle of brandy, a whistle, a love letter, etc. Even small jewellery items like a ring or pendant can be placed in the cracker. In fact, you only need to exercise your imagination creatively in order to come up with a unique gift that your loved ones would love to get.
To make even further customized Christmas crackers, you can make them entirely at home only. To do this, you can either buy a special Christmas cracker kit from the market or can buy the material required separately from the market and using it with waste household items like used toilet paper rolls. To make them more special, you can include a small message for everyone who you plan to gift the cracker to. Another good idea is to paste a photograph of the person on the cracker whom you are going to give it to.
Buying Christmas crackers
Christmas crackers otherwise can also be purchased from the market. Even some websites are selling them like hotcakes these days. The price range in which these crackers are available is $10 to $30. The price of course depends on the gift that is placed inside. Nowadays, luxury Christmas crackers have also come up which use expensive papers to wrap the cracker.
In recent years, Christmas crackers have declined in popularity in certain places. This is because some people feel that they have become monotonous and predictable as Christmas gifts. But there is no fault of Christmas crackers in this. Anything is likely to get monotonous if enough creativity is not exercised in order to add novelty to it. Thus, there is only a need for some experimentation to be done with these small traditional Christmas gifts in order to revive them.
Actually, there is a certain sense of nostalgia associated with Christmas crackers. After all, they tend to bring back sweet and innocent memories of one’s childhood years. This makes it important that the tradition of gifting these crackers is kept alive by experimenting with them frequently while not changing their basic structure.
So, this Christmas, try doing this: gift Christmas crackers to your family and see your day becoming more special and lovely.