This week on The Happy Page: It’s time for Christmas crafts! Although you could make crackers for any other holiday or special occasion you might want to use them for, they’re traditionally an English Christmas party favor. You can buy these pre-made, of course, but they’re very simple and cheap to make yourself. All you need is wrapping paper, ribbon, tape, and toilet paper tubes. And things to put inside the crackers, of course: jokes, paper hats or crowns, small gifts, candy – whatever will fit inside the tube.
But wait, you just said, the lady in the video is also putting in ‘cracker snaps’ between the tube and the paper. Shouldn’t I add a cracker snap, whatever that is?
Part of the fun of Christmas crackers has always been the snap. You can order cracker snaps from Amazon or from a specialty shoppe like Christmas Crackers USA, and they aren’t very expensive. What they are, however, are two overlapping strips of thick cardstock or very light cardboard with a thin layer of silver fulminate between them – when you pull the strips apart, the friction causes a tiny little explosive ‘POP’. They’re perfectly safe to use inside a cracker, but you won’t be able to legally mail homemade crackers that have snaps in them because of postal regulations. And no, you can’t substitute pull-string/booby trap firecrackers for cracker snaps; even the smallest pull-string firework is far and away more explosive than a cracker snap and could set your cracker and its contents on fire. Not the surprise you’re looking for at your Christmas party! But anyway, if you can’t get cracker snaps or just don’t want to deal with them, it’s perfectly okay to make your crackers without them.
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