We love ‘em and we hate ‘em almost in the same breath. Yet no Yuletide celebrations would ever be complete without Christmas crackers.Eating too much and drinking until the room begins to sway and grabbing a box of crackers is all part and parcel of a fun Christmas.
Can you imagine a Christmas without them?
We’d all miss the cheap plastic toys, the paper hats that never fit and, God forbid, the jokes… What is Santa’s favourite pizza? One that’s deep pan, crisp and even.The joke was voted the worst, groan-inducing festive gag a few years back by the readers of Nuts magazine.
- Here’s a couple more to get you into the party swing:
- How do snowmen get around? They ride an icicle.
- Who hides in the bakery at Christmas? A mince spy.
- Got you in the mood? Good, ‘cos here’s some of the best, courtesy of Guy and Will over at guy-sports.com.
- What does a frog do if his car breaks down? He gets it toad away.
- What do you call a crazy golfer? A crack put.
- And finally, one more little gem:
- What do you call a blind dinosaur? A doyouthinkhesawus.
Christmas cracker jokes, apparently, are not meant to be side-splittingly funny, according to cracker manufacturers Robin Reed Crackers. We in Britain love the fact they are not.And they should know, selling as they do literally millions of crackers every single year to a host of countries across the world, including Canada, Australia, the USA and, of course, right here in the UK.
The corny cracker joke is a tradition which has lived on over the years, with Brits preferring to groan then giggle when pulling crackers at the Christmas dinner table.Julian Reed, founder of Robin Reed, says, “Consumers genuinely prefer corny jokes, we’ve actually had complaints after trying to introduce more genuinely amusing gags – it seems that the British public have fond memories of groaning at a bad punchline after pulling their crackers!” Sounds about right. They’ve also got a cracking top ten list of the corniest cracker jokes ever. Here’s a couple of them:
- How do cows subtract? With a cow-culator.
- Why did the teacher wear sunglasses? Because her class was too bright.
- What do ghosts play at parties? Haunt and seek.
- To finish off this slightly irreverent look at Christmas crackers, do you know the length of the longest cracker ever made?
According to the Guiness World Records, the world’s longest Christmas cracker measured 63.1m (207 ft) long and 4m (13 ft) in diameter and was made by the parents of children at Ley Hill School and Pre-School, Chesham, Buckinghamshire, UK on 20 December 2001.
And largest Christmas cracker pull was achieved by 1,478 participants for an event organised by Honda R&D KEN-YU-KAI Tochigi (Japan) at Tochigi Proving Ground, Tochigi, Japan, on 18 October 2009.
