One Christmas tradition that was not invented by Charles Dickens is also one of the strangest. Like so many traditions it has now crossed the Atlantic, and next weekend millions of Americans will enjoy, or be puzzled or infuriated by those gaudy little cylinders of paper called Christmas crackers.
The British have been doing this for a 150 years, so they know the drill. This is how it works. A Christmas cracker consists of a roll of brightly colored paper with a snapper inside. These are arranged beside the plates at the festive dinner. As the meal winds down, each diner turns to his or her neighbor and offers a cracker. They grasp each end and pull. The cracker snaps and the contents fall out – invariably a small gift or toy, a joke, and a paper hat. Then everyone reads the jokes out loud, plays with the toys and puts on the paper hats. This whole ritual is so profoundly silly that everyone can relax and the real party can begin.
Crackers were invented in the 1850s by Tom Smith, a London confectioner. He is so honored for this technical breakthrough that there is a memorial water fountain dedicated to him in Finsbury Square in London, and the company still supplies crackers to the royal household. The original name for a cracker was a Cosaque, which was French for Cossacks. The name referred to the tiny explosive charge that created the crack, and which was supposed to recall the sound of whips used by Russian Cossacks as they rode through Paris during the Franco-Prussian war. The crack in a cracker is real, not an electronic sound effect. If you pull them in the dark you can see a small flash of sparks. We were once stopped at an airport when a sniffer dog detected explosives in our baggage. The explosives turned out to be in Christmas crackers that we were bringing from England.
Anyway “cracker” soon replaced Cosaque, they soon became an indispensable part of the holiday celebration in Britain, and in Canada and Australia too.
A good cracker gives pleasure on three levels. The paper hats make everyone look ridiculous, even the most dignified. The gifts are so completely tacky and useless, that they serve as an antidote to all the other seasonal gifts, and the jokes get everybody laughing.
The jokes are not new. In fact they are very ancient, and that’s the point. For some reason old recycled jokes are actually funnier than new ones, perhaps because we know what’s coming. The gifts are rubbish, the paper hats are rubbish, and the jokes are really rubbish.
My wife’s gone to the West Indies. Jamaica? No, she went of her own accord.
What did the chicken say to the duck? For goodness sake don’t cross, the road, you’ll never hear the last of it.
And so on, more or less ad infinitum. The most ancient known joke in the world, frequently found in Christmas crackers, comes from a Greek collection called the Philogelos or “laughter lover,” which is more than 1,000 years old. Like so many jokes since it features a doctor and patient.
Patient: Doctor, when I wake up I feel dizzy, but then half an hour later I feel better.
Doctor: Why don’t you try waking up half an hour later?
If you have crackers at your festive dinner, don’t waste the jokes. In the coming year, probably, we’re going to need all the jokes we can get.
Copyright: David Bouchier
