Ruth Spencer: The art of Christmas crackers

The real point of the cracker is the joke. If you don't enjoy a cracker joke you're missing the point of them. Photo / Getty Images

Ruth Spencer on the art of Christmas crackers.

When I was 5 I played a Christmas cracker in the school production. Was it then, waiting backstage in a crepe paper costume, trying not to forget my line ("I am a Christmas cracker") that my love for the cracker was born? Little glittery caskets of promise, crackers decorate a table with a totally unearned air of mystery.

You know you'll get a paper crown, which it's compulsory to wear because you look like a bigger fool if you refuse. There's a prize, which is at best bizarre; usually it's a little plastic jumping frog, but once I got a pair of cufflinks made of actual unspecified metal. It's hard to imagine the formal occasion that calls for cufflinks you got in a Christmas cracker. A Christmas Tree Ball?

But the real point of the cracker is the joke. If you don't enjoy a cracker joke you're missing the point of them. They're not there to make you laugh, which is just as well really, as a laboured Christmas pun with an exclamation mark at the end is the true sign of white-knuckle comedy desperation. They're there to make you engage with your fellow diners instead of being face down over the parson's nose.

The joke draws the entire table kicking and screaming into the festivities. My family likes to drag out the jokes, treating each set-up as a riddle. We try to guess the punchline but also compete to come up with better ones, a kind of "do it your elf" approach (sorry). If you leave off the exclamation mark you've already won.

Without the jokes, crackers can be a source of real discord. That's if you follow the arcane and pitiless Cracker Rules, where the puller who ends up with the bigger half gets the spoils. This can mean one winner gets all the prizes, while the losers can only hope for a trickle down of extra paper hats. In my family this has led to the controversial "thumb inside the cracker" technique, which gives superior grip on the snap. It's extremely successful, so the legality of this manoeuvre is under some dispute. If you ever find yourself wondering if you're cheating at Christmas crackers, you might want to have a look at yourself, maybe in that tiny plastic toy mirror that rightfully belongs to your brother.

I learned the importance of Christmas dinner jokes from my mum. During the year my mother collects up copies of the Marist Messenger Catholic magazine and produces them at Christmas dinner, folded open to certain places. Not to read out improving articles on the reason for the season, but because the Marist Messenger has a surprisingly good joke page.

There are some absolute standouts, like the one about the guy in Wales who visits Llanfairpwllg-wyngyllgogerychwryndrobwllllantysiliogogogoch, and goes into a local store to enquire about its pronunciation. "Can you say the name of this place slowly?" he asks the girl at the counter, to which she replies, "Burrrrrrrrrgerrrrrrrr Kiiiiiiiiiing." If wedidn't die laughing that day, it was a Christmas miracle.

Mum also had the brilliant idea one year of making our own crackers. This might sound labour-intensive, but it beats the time I bought beautiful shining crackers with amazing prizes to take home for Christmas, then had to bin them at the airport because technically they're fireworks and can't go on the plane. Mum had bought the snaps separately, which is apparently a thing you can do, and she assigned my older sister, Catherine, the job of writing the jokes. The rest of us gathered toilet rolls (why do so many children's crafts involve hoarded toilet rolls?), printer paper, scissors and old Christmas cards and set about making crackers. They looked cute, very festive and Pinteresty.

At dinner, they were a disaster. We pulled. And pulled. Squared our shoulders and planted our feet and pulled again. Nothing. We had not taken into account the subtle physics of the Christmas cracker. No matter the force applied, they would not be cracked. It turns out real crackers are slit around the ends; printer paper isn't fragile enough to pop open, even in the spirit of Christmas.

In the end we peeled the crackers open like crayfish, then pulled the snaps separately for the bang. The jokes were good though, and although I can't remember any now, I asked Catherine to write a few more (see below) in case you forgot to subscribe to Marist Messenger this year and you'd like to squirrel them away for Christmas dinner.

Merry Christmas!

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