Cracker

Today’s prompt for the Xmas Magic challenge is “cracker”. This one honestly stumped me for a bit. My first thought was firecracker but that didn’t quite make sense that the children who put the list together would call them crackers instead of firecrackers or fireworks given that even in the UK where they live, fireworks is still the common vernacular.

For similar reasons, I didn’t think it meant cracker like the food because thats not very typical for Christmas or New Year’s in any culture. It was time for me to do some research. I can’t do a creative project if I don’t know what I’m creating.

As I mentioned, the list originated from children in the UK so I started by looking up what cracker would mean in the UK related to Christmas. I found that Christmas Crackers are a thing. They are cardboard tubes split in 2 and wrapped with pretty paper. The tubes are often filled with a simple prize, crown, or riddle. There is also material that makes a cracking sound when they are broken. The crackers are opened when two people pull on opposite ends of them causing the cracking sound and splitting them open to reveal the prize.

Now that I knew what they were, I had to decide what I wanted to create. None of my coloring books had this kind of cracker in them for me to color. I thought about making one but that didn’t strike a cord with me. Ultimately I settled on this blog post. Writing is creative too and I wanted to share the way I hyper fixated on learning about this new thing as part of the creative challenge I was planning for.

Learning about Christmas crackers got me thinking about various cultural traditions that might be similar. The ones that come to mind are because of my personal experience. I am sure there are more and I hope one day to learn about them.

The first one I thought of was the wishbone. The “U” shaped bone found in turkeys that people pull on to break. The person who gets the largest half is supposed to have their wish come true.

The second comes from my Jewish heritage, the Afikoman. The Afikoman is a piece of Matzo that is split in 2 during the Passover Seder. One half is hidden for the children to find. The child who finds it gets a prize.

While I didn’t make or do any thing super artistic, this prompt was very special to me for how it taught me something new about the culture in the UK and other countries that have the Christmas cracker tradition. Something I’ve never experienced here in the U.S. To me this is as much in the spirt of Christmas as all of the other projects I have done as it was an opportunity to broaden my horizons and become more informed about the world. I am thankful for the lessons I learned while doing this research and maybe next year I will add Christmas crackers to our celebration!

-Flower