During the holiday season, parties are frequent. There’s the office party, the department party, the private parties and the family holiday dinner. Whether you’re sitting down to a family feast or enjoying the festivities with friends and co-workers, there’s one holiday tradition that must grace your holiday table or be distributed among a happy group of celebrants. That is the tradition of the Christmas cracker. I’m not talking about the type of cracker that you eat with cheese and dips, I’m talking about those gaily wrapped tubular packages that literally – pop!  These highly decorative crackers not only pop, but are filled with little trinkets, silly jokes, or love messages.

They’ve been around a long, long time. It has been noted that Tom Smith created these festive treats in the 1800s. As the story goes, Smith was an English candy maker and while vacationing in France, he witnessed the popularity of little bonbons wrapped individually in pretty papers. He took the idea back to his own shop and was quite successful with the wrapped candies. However, he wasn’t totally satisfied. He thought that perhaps placing the candy in a wrapper, including a paper message, and then putting an outer wrapper around both the candy and the message might be just the thing. It was.

That is, until Smith found himself still thinking that it could be better. It has been reported by several sources that he was actually standing by his fireplace and thinking about how to improve his bonbon packaging when a log snapped with a bang and burst into flames.  That’s just what the candy man wanted – a bang for his bonbon. After years of experimentation, he came up with the tubular concept that so many of us are familiar with today.

Read more about the creation of the festive holiday cracker in the December issue of The Review.