I was asked what a ‘Christmas Cracker’ was recently by a Portuguese colleague, as one laid beside her plate at a Xmas Party, and I was embarrassed that despite being English, I hadn’t a clue why we Brits always had them, or from where they had even originated, but they have always been part of Christmas celebrations in the United Kingdom, Ireland and Commonwealth countries such as Australia, Canada, New Zealand and South Africa.

Apparently they were invented by a London-based confectioner and baker called Tom Smith (1823 – 1869) who set up shop in Clerkenwell in the 1840s, originally producing wedding cakes and sweets. He discovered the French 'bon bon' while on a trip to Paris - a sugared almond wrapped in a twist of tissue paper - which proved to be a hit at Christmas time, and to encourage year-round sales, he added a small love motto inside the wrapper.

Snap inside

The inspiration to add the explosive 'pop' was supposedly to mimic the crackling sound of a Christmas-time log fire, and our enterprising Mr Smith went on to patent his first cracker device in 1847 and perfected the mechanism in the 1860s. It was simply two narrow strips of paper layered together, with silver fulminate painted on one side and an abrasive surface on the other – and when pulled apart, the friction created a small - but noisy - bang. The crackers are usually pulled between two people, but if there is a group around a table at a party, everyone crosses their arms to pull all the crackers at once. Nowadays, the love motto has been replaced with a cheesy joke, and no Christmas party would be complete without crackers, with people taking delight in reading the ‘mottos’ (as they are still occasionally called) aloud across the table to each other, groaning at the answers, and are actually quite an ice-breaker if the party includes strangers.

All hand-made

In time, Walter, Tom’s son, added the paper hats, and sourced novelties and gifts to put inside the cracker from Europe, America and Japan. The success of the cracker enabled them to employ 2,000 people by the 1890s.

Crackers and the hats were made by hand, which involved cutting tissue paper with heavy guillotines, pasting, folding and carefully packing for a perfect presentation.

Novelty crackers followed topical trends and their boxes referenced popular crazes, with writers being commissioned to compose snappy lines, and crackers were being used to celebrate major occasions.

The Totem Cracker

By the 1920s, Tom Smith's crackers were advertised as ‘World Renowned Christmas Crackers. No party complete without them’. The famous 'Totem Tom-Tom Crackers’ were based on a West End hit ‘Rose-Marie’ set in the Canadian Rockies, which featured a chorus of over 50 'Redskin Totem-Pole Girls', clad in colourful outfits and elaborate headdresses, and his famous totem cracker was based on these very same girls, embodying the decadent frivolity of the flapper-era musical. They came complete with Totem-Pole Girl headdresses, musical toys, imitation jewellery and 'quips and jokes', inside and were sold for 34 shillings, and enormous amount in those days.

In the 1950s and 1960s, Tom Smith & Co. was making 30,000 crackers a week. Today Christmas crackers are produced for every pocket, from luxurious to fun-sized, and can contain anything from a novelty plastic moustache to something more useful, such as a luxury pen, for example. The Tom Smith brand continues to produce luxury crackers, including special crackers for the British Royal Household, although the designs and contents are a closely guarded secret!

Author

Marilyn writes regularly for The Portugal News, and has lived in the Algarve for some years. A dog-lover, she has lived in Ireland, UK, Bermuda and the Isle of Man. 

Marilyn Sheridan