Crackers are brilliant, almost mind bogglingly so. Everyone dismisses them as a silly little tradition, but they are what make Christmas dinner so special. First, they force you to interact with the other dinner guests. Although made of paper and cardboard a cracker takes a surprising amount of effort to pull apart. Regardless of how you feel about each other, for that brief moment, you and your fellow dinner guest are connected and working toward a mutual goal. Your efforts are then rewarded with a thrilling pop and a prize, which will inevitably fly across the room and land in someones plate or knock over a glass of wine. For several moments the entire dinner party will be frantically searching for their errant prizes. After the scrum dies down, the men will find that they are now the proud owners of pot metal lipstick cases and hair clips, while the women find themselves equipped with tiny screwdriver sets and tie pins. After several rounds of mutually beneficial swaps, everyone has a prize they enjoy and will cherish forever, but will inevitably lose by the New Year and never think about again. Then comes the donning of the paper crowns. The pinnacle of British Egalitarianism, for everyone, from the lordliest aristocracy to the lowliest guttersnipe, looks equally royal and ridiculous. Those that doff or happen to rip their crowns are severely shunned, for they obviously think they are better than everybody else and have no place in the new social order. Once things have settled down a bit, each member will take turns reading their joke to the rest of the table. This is a magical moment that can only come from a Christmas cracker. It may be the one, and perhaps only, time that the entire table will ever agree on anything. Regardless of the politics, drama, and arguments that may have come before, everyone will agree that each and every joke was unmitigatedly and abysmally terrible. With the cracker ceremony complete, the flaming ball of thrice-boiled pudding consumed, we settle down to hear Her Royal Highness address her considerably smaller but still great Empire. Eyes across the Commonwealth will be glued to the screen hoping that perhaps this year she will make the address adorned in a tattered paper crown with gin and tonic in hand like a true Briton on Christmas.
Posted on: Thu, 04 Dec 2014 07:55:41 +0000
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