We Brits have been crackers about crackers for over 150 years, when Tom Smith, a London-based confectioner, discovered, on a working trip to Paris in the 1840s, the French Bon-Bon, a sugared almond wrapped in a twist of coloured paper. But not initially as the mainstay of our Christmas dinner that Christmas crackers eventually became.

Once back at home in the East End of London, Smith discovered that bonbons proved to be a real hit at Christmas so, to encourage sales after Christmas as well, he added a small love motto inside the wrapper as a precursor of the cracker joke and started wrapping his sweets more lavishly, and in rolls of brightly coloured crepe paper.

In 1847, the popping of a log fire inspired Tom to think of the explosive sales potential of a rolled-up sweet being ‘fought’ over and the wrapper being pulled apart by the loving couple with a snap and a crackle. He patented the ‘cracker’ device in 1847 and perfected the trick in the 1860s: two narrow layers of paper, silver fulminate pasted on one piece, an abrasive strip on the other: pull them apart and the friction caused a tiny pop! and, lo, the cracker was born…

By 1861, Tom had given up pure confectionery and was concentrating on his ‘Bangs of Expectation’, rolling out different designs that referenced popular crazes and ever-brighter colours and capitalising on the vogue for fireworks and the British appetite for all things that had a spot of devilry and a whiff of gunpowder about them. The end of the Crimean War in 1856, for example, had seen a massive fireworks display to celebrate.

To start with, crackers were designed by Tom Smith for a wide range of celebrations, marketed as a novelty to make events go with a bang. Tom’s son Walter added fancy paper hats and small gifts from Europe, America and Japan to make more of them, much to the buying public’s delight… by the turn of the 20th century, the business employed over 2,000 people at its new Finsbury Square premises, including many female workers.

The love notes soon expanded to snappy aphorisms, written by specially commissioned writers, supposedly to tickle the public’s curiosity and, later, humour. One common denominator that the love notes, the epigrams and the jokes all seem to have is that none of them are actually ever funny!

Have you ever found a cracker joke funny? Please share it in the comments below!

By the 1920s and 30s, the artwork for cracker boxes had reached a peak of design detail and was starting to be more associated with the festive season - Smith’s boasted of ‘Our World Renowned Christmas Crackers: No Party Complete Without Them’. The covers of the boxes remained eclectic: there was a story or a joke or a cultural reference on just about every box, even if the crackers themselves remained fairly plain. Sometimes boxes were even collected and traded in their own right, like the ones dedicated to Charlie Chaplin or the new craze for greyhound racing…

The dour WW2 war years, with paper rationing and a restriction on the ‘snaps’, was obviously a setback for the cracker industry but in the 50s and 60s, they snapped back into shape: at one point, Tom Smith & Co were making 30,000 a week.

Since the 1980s, however, a taste for the shiny and generic has crept in, edging out the colourful detail and opting instead for a more homogenous palette of the Christmas colours gold, silver, red and green. The boxes themselves, once collectors’ items, have faded from view entirely and are now simply carriers, with a ‘vanity’ window to see the cracker designs within.

Some cracker trivia

The world's longest Christmas cracker measured 207ft long and 13ft in diameter and was made by the parents of children at Ley Hill School and Pre-School, Chesham, Buckinghamshire, UK on 20 December 2001.

The biggest Christmas cracker pull was done by 1,081 people at an event organised by the Harrodian School in West London on the 10th December 2015 and, in 2020, comedian Alan Davis set a Guinness World Record for the most crackers pulled by an individual in 30 seconds while filming the quiz show QI, with 35… but the record only stood for a year: Joel Cory achieved 41 successful ‘cracks’ at the Capital Radio Jingle Bell Ball in December 2021.

Do you still have Christmas crackers at your Christmas dinner? Or is it a tradition that has faded over recent years? Let us know in the comments below we would love to hear from you.