Christmas and the Crackers

 Merry Christmas everyone!  We had a completely happy one here in South Africa, at our house.  One South African/British tradition we have adopted is making Christmas Crackers for each person to open on Christmas Day.  I have had a few Americans ask me how to make them, so I took pictures as I made them this year. 

 You save toilet paper rolls for a while before Christmas.  Only the best will do. 

 I cut out 10 pieces of wrapping paper, big enough to roll them in.  That skinny brown thing is the cracker part.  When you pull the two ends, it makes a nice, satisfying "BANG".  I don't know where to find them in America.  Here I find them at a store that sells packaging stuff.  You lay that next to your TP Rolls.

 Stuff in a gift of a chocolate...

 and a tiger or whatever you like.  Then you forget to take any more pictures!  Oops.  But you just roll them up in the paper, and tape the paper closed.  You tie a ribbon tightly in between each of the TP Rolls, and then you can remove the end rolls, so just the middle one stays. 

 They go right on your Christmas table where they make a happy, noisy moment at the beginning of the meal.  We had them on our adult table...

 to cheer up little people who got stuck with the adults...

and on our kid table where they quickly got destroyed and devoured.  : - )    I imagine there is a much better tutorial on Pinterest and You Tube.

We wish you all a joyous Jesus' birthday!  and  I wish I could give you all a plate of chocolate covered cherries!

I could blog a whole story about my 3 attempts to make such a simple thing, and my 3 different failures.  The last failure was my failure to deliver some of them to the people they were intended for, but I had no complaints at our house about that one.