One of our family's Christmas Day traditions is the opening of the Christmas crackers. Some years, a box of crackers have been a gift to us. Other years, I've bought us a box. This year, one daughter and I decided rather last-minute to make our own Christmas crackers. (Here's the story -- my daughter and I were exiting a store together when another shopper came in and asked the clerk if they had any Christmas crackers left. The clerk replied that they only had the small ones left. As we were walking away, I suggested we make our own, and I gave some ideas of what we could use and what we could put inside for free. I honestly thought this would go down as another one of those ideas that never materializes. But I do love a good craft, especially one that sort of saves us money. I say sort of because we were on the path of just doing Christmas without crackers this year.)
onto the crackers . . .
We spent a couple of hours one afternoon and used only materials that we had on hand.
We began with the paper tube, made with a sheet of copy paper folded in half and rolled into a tube, securing with tape.
We needed items for filling, of course. So I started with simple, corny Christmas riddles. I found a page of them online, selected 6 that I liked, printed them out, and cut them into strips. I've folded each in half so the reader can take a guess themselves, as well as try to stump the rest of us.
We cut a bunch of tiny snowflakes to put in each tube.
My daughter and I dusted off our origami skills (and found some instructions online) and made a couple of creatures, a star, a heart, and a couple of flowers, using scraps of previously used gift wrap paper. Foil gift wrap works best for tiny origami folding.
And of course, a piece of chocolate tops off the list of filling items. It's not really about what is in the cracker, but the fun of discovering each thing. After all, I no longer have any of the trinkets from previous Christmas crackers. They're not exactly of the "keeping" tier of bits and baubles.
We tucked trinkets into each paper roll.
Then we wrapped each tube in tissue paper.
And finally, we tied the ends of the tissue in cuts of previously used curling ribbons and decorated each cracker with Christmas stickers that came free in the mail.
When I've bought crackers for our family before, I've spent between $10 and $15 for a box of 8. We made 6 of these crackers for pennies. Our costs were for 7 sheets of copy paper, a foot and a half of clear tape, 3 sheets of new tissue paper, and the 6 chocolate candies. The gift wrap for origami, the curling ribbon, and the stickers were all either free and new or previously used (basically free). Of course, our homemade crackers won't "pop" like boughten ones. But I think they'll be fun, nonetheless.
