One of the things I associate most with Christmas Dinner is the pulling of crackers - after they've been snapped comes the random assignment of funny little gifts - the donning of paper hats that don't quite fit and of course the reading out of bad jokes.
I love the fact that the gifts are random but the quality of the gifts in bought crackers is never very good so if you want to do something about that the best solution is to make your own crackers.
Next stage is to undo them, pop the snap into the cracker along with paper hat (not shown), joke and gift. Reform and tie with ribbons.
I followed the instructions here.
The traditional way to pull the crackers goes like this:
- Stand or sit in a circle.Everyone has one cracker.
- Hold the cracker in your right hand - you may want to hold onto the snap just to make sure it cracks.
- Cross your arms and with your left hand hold on tight to your neighbours cracker.
- One, two, three - Crack! Everyone pulls their crackers together.
- Anyone left holding more than one body of cracker - maybe still containing bits hands that to someone without one.
- Scrabble around on the floor looking for gifts that fell out during the crack.
- Put on your paper hat.
- Take it in turns to read out the jokes.
- Play with the gifts - or wear them - swap them - or carefully hide amongst the paper rubbish...
Update: This was my final version - I used it as a Christmas card that could be made into a cracker: