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Tradition: Making your own Christmas crackers
Why make your own Christmas crackers? Why indeed? asks one grandmother who's been doing it for more than two decades.
Each year I ask myself what I've gotten in to as I spend an entire day at my kitchen table surrounded by acres of crepe paper, tissue paper, Sellotape, tubs of glue and a familiar sense of panic. It all began...
Many years ago when my children were small and biddable (oh, happy days!). I wanted to imbue in these little darlings some sense of taste that was not available in shop crackers. And anyway, what child would want a key ring or eyebrow tweezers, which is what most crackers yielded in those days. I started with loo roll holders stuffed with a 50 pence matchbox toy for the boys and pretend make-up for the girls. I produced a cracker-shaped cover out of crepe paper, and so a tradition was born. No Christmas chez Mum is complete without pulling our now very sophisticated crackers between the main course and pudding.
However, in the beginning, my crackers may have had bags of originality but they had no bang, and no motto to groan loudly at. Small miracles happen and, I know not how, I discovered where I could buy a complete cracker-making kit, with metal formers and complicated instructions for making really cracking crackers. That kit is still with me and has made such a difference to my cracker-manufacturing day. I now know where to get snaps that really bang, I buy joke books to flesh out my stable of hackneyed and corny mottos, and so the finished product is now a gilded lily of frills and expensive ribbon.
Do not ever think that this mini-cottage industry is a money-saver, no matter what those budget Christmas articles say. The five toddlers have grown up, acquired partners and become an urbane City boy, a television producer, a doctor, a teacher and a garden designer. The 50p matchbox toy has been replaced by real pearl earrings, solid silver collar stiffeners and once, a stopwatch for a grandson. However, my best enclosure was for my husband's cracker several years ago, when I stuffed in all my cut up credit cards.
And so, as 25 December approaches, I must make my decision about colour schemes for Christmas, for the cracker must match the wrapping paper, which must match the tree decorations. It's hard work creating the Mum's Traditional Christmas Experience, which my little darlings have come to expect. But although it can be a fleeting delight, with the cracker crepe and ribbon thrown in the dustbin on Boxing Day, I must yet again hew to my self-imposed traditions. Christmas wouldn't go with a bang without them.
Christmas cracker kits are available through craft stores.
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