Advent Sunday in Old Money: Day 10

 

What's in Your Cracker?

Around 1965 – it might have been earlier or later – I pulled a Christmas cracker and out dropped what looked like a plastic bat. It was black, had two ‘horns’ in the centre, and wings on either side. What on earth was it? I think our dad probably demonstrated how to use it: it was a plastic moustache, and the ‘horns’ were there so you could fix it into your nostrils.

These daft novelty items – still manufactured to this day – were but one of any number of pieces of plastic tat you’d find in the average Christmas cracker, alongside rings, small combs, cowboys and even a kind of useless magnifying glass. These days, plastic is the antichrist, and there’s actually a petition on Change.org to ban the sale of Christmas crackers with plastic tat inside them, which strikes me as being somewhat joyless and Scrooge-like: I mean, it’s not as if they’re going to be flushed down the toilet to pollute our waterways and oceans. Are they?

Anyway, if they’re not going to our oceans, then where exactly do the old Christmas cracker novelties go? I’ll tell you the answer to that: I’ve got them. There’s a drawer in my dining table into which I put any cracker premiums when Christmas is over. In there, you’ll find items such as miniature playing cards, doll-sized notebooks and pencils, interlocking metal puzzles and no end of tabletop spinners.

In a previous post I mentioned our so-called ‘rummagy boxes’ whose contents comprised a whole host of Christmas cracker toys. Going through them, I would always turn up tiny playing cards which I knew dated to around 1966, and many different examples of the plastic bat-moustache. Christmas crackers must have supported a whole industry out in Hong Kong. Alongside the obligatory toy, you got a ‘motto’ or cheap joke on a tiny scroll of paper and a tissue paper hat, time-honoured traditions dating back a century or more.

Contemporary cracker toys, 2013-2023: compare them with the 1960s and 70s items below.

It’s fairly well known that the first Christmas crackers were invented by British baker and confectioner Tom Smith as a means of reviving a flagging range of sweets, initially using quite small wrappers. Smith was inspired by a crackling log on the fire to add the ‘banger’ element, which meant upscaling his original design somewhat. The bon-bons were eventually replaced with small trinkets, and the cracker as we know it today had been born.

You get what you pay for with a box of Christmas crackers. Anything under a tenner, and you can expect the familiar round of plastic tat; between ten and fifteen pounds, you might find a small metal comb or puzzle of some kind, maybe a couple of dice, or a random metal object that appears to serve no immediate purpose. Over twenty pounds, and I think one is entitled to expect a better standard of novelty, but the sky’s the limit where crackers are concerned, and super deluxe contents push prices towards the stratosphere.

Of all the items that ever dropped out of a Christmas cracker, the most useful to me by far has been a set of tiny screwdrivers, of about the right scale to be used by Brains out of Thunderbirds. Despite their size, they’re fully functional and have been put to good use on many occasions, tightening the unusually tiny screws you sometimes find on guitars, or pairs of spectacles.

As to the jokes, they seldom rise to the level of The Beano. For the best Christmas cracker joke, we have to look to the festive edition of The Good Life, Silly But It’s Fun (1977) wherein one of Tom Good’s home-made crackers memorably contained the information that ‘the ooh-ah bird is so called because it lays square eggs’, utterly mystifying its recipient, Margo Leadbetter...

In my childhood, crackers were invariably wrapped in crepe paper, but today they're more likely to be thick cardboard, which doesn't always break as easily. The banger remains exactly as it always was: two thin strips of card, coated at the join with a tiny amount of gunpowder – yes, actual gunpowder. The amount is so small that only a modest amount of heat is required to set it off, and the friction of pulling the two halves apart is always sufficient. So now you know – there's gunpowder on your festive dining table...