posted 01-26-2005 04:50 PM            

If you know then let others have some fun guessing before you reveal what it is. If necessary, I have an additional hint photo .

What's your guess?

posted 01-28-2005 11:48 AM            

Christmas cracker - a tube of brightly colored paper. When pulled apart, it makes a harmless exploding sound. It usually contains a small gift and a joke. It is an English Christmas tradition and is used at Christmas parties or Christmas dinners.

quote:

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[<gone from the internet> .bbc.co.uk/education/beyond/factsheets/makhist/makhist4_prog11d.shtml]
Christmas crackers
Making History
BBC Radio Article

Sarah Langdon from Worcester says that pulling Christmas Crackers to make a bang seems such an odd idea and wonders where that tradition began.

Making History consulted Christine Lalumia, deputy director of the Geffreye (pronounced Jeffrey) Museum in London where currently there is an exhibition called Christmas Past: 400 years of seasonal traditions in English Homes.

The inventor of the Christmas cracker was a Victorian baker, Tom Smith. In 1830, Smith started working in a baker and ornamental confectioner’s shop in London, selling sweets – fondants, pralines and gum pastilles. Before long he was devising his own confections and set himself up in business in Goswell Road, Clerkenwell.

At the turn of the century, Tom Smith produced crackers not only for the Christmas season but also to celebrate every major occasion from The Paris Exhibition in 1900 to War Heroes in 1918 and The World Tour in 1926 of Prince Edward, the Prince of Wales.

Contents were tailored to each box: grotesque or artistic masks, puzzles, conundrums, tiny treasures, jewels, games and mottoes. Most of the beautifully illustrated boxes, crackers and hats – from fezzes to sheikhs’ head-dresses – were made by hand. The fully-illustrated catalogues, which date back to 1877, provide an exceptional visual history of British social and political evolvement over an entire century.

Smith often travelled abroad to look for new ideas. When visiting Paris in 1840 he came across the ‘bon-bon’, a sugared almond wrapped in a twist of tissue paper, and decided to bring it to London. The sweet sold especially well at Christmas. Intent on making the bon-bon more attractive, he added a small love motto which he put inside the tissue paper. The ultimate, he thought, would be to add a crackle or bang. The problem was how to do it. He soon realised that something bigger than a bon-bon was needed. He would place a compound inside it which would make a bang when disturbed.

Smith perfected his chemical explosion with the use of saltpetre to create a bang caused by friction when the wrapping was broken. This eventually became the snap, and the cracker was born.

The trade jumped at Tom Smith’s latest novelty and he was snowed under with orders. Very quickly he began to refine his product. He dropped the sweet and the bon-bon name, calling his new crackers Cosaques, but he kept the motto and added a surprise gift.

Delighted at his overnight success, Smith decided to explore the export market and took his cracker abroad. At this time, only one design of cracker was being made and to his horror, an Eastern manufacturer seized his idea, copied it and delivered a consignment of crackers to Britain just before Christmas. Not surprisingly, in true fashion, Smith immediately rose to the challenge. He designed eight different kinds of cracker, worked his staff day and night and distributed stocks throughout the country also in time for Christmas. After this he never looked back.

At the turn of the century the demand for crackers, and especially those which celebrated current trends and events, was high.

The original early Victorian mottoes were mainly love verses. Eventually these were replaced by more complicated puzzles and cartoons, and finally by the corny jokes and riddles which characterize our crackers today.

Illustration of children pulling a cracker from 'The Graphic Christmas', 1878

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