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CHRISTMAS CRACKERS -
OR WHY DO THE BRITISH WEAR PAPER HATS AT
CHRISTMAS LUNCH?
All over Britain on Christmas Day,
families can be found sitting around their dining tables enjoying a
traditional lunch of roast turkey with all the trimmings - and all,
regardless of age, wearing coloured paper hats. It is rumoured that
even the Queen wears her paper hat over lunch!
So why this quaint tradition? Where do
these paper hats come from? The answer is the Christmas Cracker.
A Christmas Cracker is a cardboard paper
tube, wrapped in brightly coloured paper and twisted at
both ends. There is a banger
inside the cracker, two strips of chemically impregnated
paper that react with friction so that
when the cracker is pulled apart by two people, the cracker makes a bang.
Each person takes the end of the cracker and
pulls (as above). Or if there is a group around the table, everyone
crosses their arms to pull all the crackers at once. Everyone holds their
own cracker in their right hand and pulls
their neighbours cracker with their free left hand.
Inside the cracker there is a
paper crown made from
tissue paper, a motto or joke
on a slip of paper and a little
gift. It is a standing joke that the mottos in crackers are unfunny, corny and
often very well known, as the same jokes have been appearing in
crackers for decades!
Crackers can be made from scratch using the tubes inside used
toilet rolls and tissue paper: the maker can then choose small
personalised gifts
for their guests.
Christmas crackers are a British tradition dating
back to Victorian times when in the early 1850s, London confectioner
Tom Smith started adding a motto to his sugared almond bon-bons
which he sold wrapped in a twisted paper package.
As many of his bon-bons were bought by men to
give to women, many of the mottos were simple love poems.
He was inspired to add the "bang" when
he heard the crackle of a log he had just put on the fire. He decided
to make a log shaped package that would produce a surprise bang and
inside would be an almond and a motto. Soon the sugared almond was
replaced with a small gift. Originally sold as the Cosaque it soon
became known by the public as the 'cracker'.
The paper hat was added to the cracker in the early
1900s by his sons and by the end of the 1930s, the love poems had
been replaced by jokes or limericks.
The cracker was soon adopted as a
traditional festive custom and today virtually every household has
at lest one box of crackers to pull over Christmas.
The idea of wearing a
paper crown may have originated from the Twelfth Night celebrations,
where a King or Queen was appointed to look over the proceedings.
© HUK
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