Talk:Christmas cracker

Translations?

I am considering translating this page, first, into French and then possibly to Spanish. I believe the term for Christmas Cracker in French is "diablotin" (though they are a British tradition and I have never seen them in France) and the Spanish possibly "sorpresa navideña", or transliterated "buscapiés navideño"

Angryafghan 21:42, 10 January 2007 (UTC)

Alternate Versions

I made two edits regarding slight diffrences in the tradition. Firstly to explain that its not just the extremely wealthy who will have personalised crackers. Make Your Own Cracker kits are actually pretty common and many people will buy them and put cheap but personalised gifts like nail varnish or keyrings into them. Secondly some people (esspecially those who do make their own crackers) will often pre-assign each person their own and they keep the gift, no matter which end its in. I've actually only met one person who did it the other way - where it goes to the person who gets that end. (Unfortunately it was in primary school and caused a lot of fights when she deliberately held crackers in the middle and then explained the tradition afterwards.) Danikat 19:39, 16 May 2007 (UTC)

"Crackers are often pulled after Christmas dinner or at parties." Surely crackers are usually pulled at the beginning of Christmas dinner so you can wear the silly hats during the meal?135.245.72.35 15:51, 12 July 2007 (UTC)

Yes! Deary me. lol --Beeurd (talk) 20:55, 31 August 2008 (UTC)

Dead Mouse Incident

I believe the dead mouse incident is an important piece of trivia for this article. However, I am not sure that it is included in a good spot. It is in the 2nd paragraph and seems to be just stuck in there. Maybe a section could be added about crackers in the news, but just one incident probably wouldn't justify that.--75.191.135.245 (talk) 09:05, 28 December 2007 (UTC)

Original Research tag

The part about Christmas crackers on The Office (US) sounds like it could be true, but knowing who wrote it, it is probably vandalism, but even if it isn't, it is still unsourced. AlexWangombe (talk) 22:59, 29 October 2008 (UTC)

Christmas Cracker Joke

Does anyone think that part is unencyclopedic? Fangfufu (talk) 21:50, 16 December 2008 (UTC)

Earlier reference

Cut from article:

However, the OED may well be in error as they appear to have been available in France in 1817. Lt. Colonel Felton Hervey states in a letter dated 7 November 1817 The night before last Ar[thur] Hill desired me to give a letter to the Duchess of R[ichmon]d, which I did very innocently. It contained one of these crackers, called Cossacks, which are sold in the fair here. It went off, and the duchess also, into one of the most violent fits of laughing hysterics ever witnessed. I am happy to say she does not think me guilty. I wonder it did not kill the old woman.

It is clear that this refers not to christmas crackers, but to a prank in which a firework "a Cossack" was hidden in a letter. There are none of the elements that would make it a "cracker": there is no gift or bon-bon, it is not at christmas, it is not a shared parcel. As such I don't think it can be said to deal with "Christamas crackers" and I removed it.Zeimusu | Talk page 10:45, 20 December 2011 (UTC)

Relation to the invisible friend

I wonder if there is any relation between the traditional English cracker and what we call in Spain "invisible friend", which is a little gift received from someone you don't know (within your family, colleagues or friends). It's also celebrated on Christmas Eve. — Preceding unsigned comment added by Aborra22 (talk • contribs) 18:56, 1 April 2012 (UTC)

History nonsense

I note that none of the history section is properly sourced. Some of it might be true, but I'm pretty sure that a man in Britain in the 1840s or 1850s, however well educated on world confectionery customs, would not know of the ancient Chinese custom of putting a motto inside a fortune cookie. The reason should be obvious. This makes me somewhat suspicious of the rest of the details.

Paper hat

Why does "paper hat" redirect to this article? Not all paper hats come from Christmas crackers. In fact, I was looking for information on the practice of making hats out of newspaper. Tad Lincoln (talk) 05:17, 6 September 2014 (UTC)

2015 xmas cleanup

Hi, I just tidied up the introductory paragraph a bit and tried to correct a few small mistakes. — Preceding unsigned comment added by 90.209.237.175 (talk) 04:15, 17 December 2015 (UTC)

US-centredness

'They aren't seen commonly in the United States'. Here, as so often, I'm struck by the US-centredness of so many Wikipedia articles - the seemingly automatic assumption that English-speaking users see everything from an American point of view, whereas of course most of us don't (there are a billion Indians, just for starters). Since the article says Christmas crackers are common in the UK, Ireland and Australia, without any mention of the USA, there's surely no reason to spell it out for us, as though it might otherwise be taken for granted!213.127.210.95 (talk) 17:02, 21 January 2016 (UTC)

Problem with the last sentence in "Tradition"

I stumbled onto the article to read about this, and found an issue that requires fixing.

I fixed a typo in the last sentence in "Tradition" section ("reassembled" should have been "resembled") but the entire sentence is extremely weird to me. "The results resembled a gun being fired, and the effect on their ears was as if they had been shot in them." What does that mean? If this actually resembled being shot in the ear, it would mean either deafness or death, which seems pretty weird for a collection of 10 cardboard crackers. I don't know enough about this tradition (or this toy) to feel confident in fixing the article, but I think it should either be explained better (and if this is true, then citation is definitely needed) or it sounds like an exaggeration and the sentence should be taken out. Mooeypoo (talk) 22:09, 25 December 2016 (UTC)