A Christmas cracker traditionally contains a paper crown, a small gift and a joke written on a slip of paper.A box of 12 crackers costing £10 could come with gifts such as a shoe horn, compact mirror, playing cards, screwdrivers, address book, tape measure, pad lock, bottle opener, tweezers, travel chess, photo frame and pen.
HOW TO PULL A CRACKER:
The traditional way to pull a cracker is crossing your arms and ..
... pulling a whole circle of crackers around the table.
Everyone holds their cracker in their right hand and pulls their neighbours cracker with the free left hand.
The tradicion of wearing hats at parties goes back to the Roman Saturnalia calebrations(celebrated aroud 25 december) when the participans also wore hats.
During a visit to Paris he came across the bob-bon, a sugar almond wrapped in tissue paper (with a twist either side of the centrally placed sweet). Thomas decided to try selling similarly wrapped sweets in the lead up to Christmas in England. His bon-bons sold well at Christmas but not at other times of the year.In the early 1850s Thomas came up with the idea of including a motto with the sweet. As many of his bon-bons were bought by men to give to women, many of the mottos were simple love poems.
In about 1860, Thomas added the banger, two strips of chemically impregnated paper that made a loud noise on being pulled apart. At first these novelties were called 'cosaques', but they soon became known as 'crackers'.
Unfortunately for Thomas, his 'cracker' idea was copied by other manufactures and so he decided to replace the sweet with a surprise gift.
When Thomas died his two sons took over the business. The paper hat was added to the cracker the early 1900s and by the end of the 1930s the love poems had been replaced by jokes or limericks.
BY: MARINA, RODRIGO, SILVANA AND DIEGO.R
