The History of the Christmas Crackers
There is an item you will find on nearly every Christmas table around the world – the Christmas cracker, also known as a Christmas bonbons.

Tom Smith was an apprentice baker in a London bakery in the 1830’s. Tom progressed to open his own sweets and cake shop in East London in the late 1830’s.

In 1840, whilst on a trip to Paris he noticed the latest food fad was a sugar coated almond which was twisted in colourful, waxed tissue paper and sold in a beautiful box. It was called a bonbon.

In the Christmas of that year, Smith used the idea in East London and his best selling items were wrapped bonbons. When his competitors started copying him, he was inspired by the Chinese custom of the fortune cookie and included a small romantic message in each bonbon. This provided the necessary point of difference for the next year, but he was copied again.

Smith then decided to replace the sugar coated almond with a small gift like a charm or trinket. The gift was placed in a small tube in the middle of the bonbon and the paper was wrapped at each end. This reinvention of the bonbon was very popular and Smith had record sales the next Christmas.

While the redesigned bonbon was proving very successful, Smith still felt there was the opportunity for a further novelty factor. In 1845 as he sat in front of the home fire, he threw a smouldering log onto the flames and there was a large crackling sound. This sound gave Smith the inspiration to design bonbons the way we buy and use them today.

For two years Smith worked on a way to make the crackling sound and finally came up with the solution by pasting a small amount of potassium nitrate onto a thin strip of cardboard that ran through the tube. When the bonbon was pulled from either end, the two thin strips of cardboard separated and a spark was ignited which resulted in the desired crackle.

Christmas crackers were a hit with families all over the world. By 1900, Tom Smith alone was producing around 13 million crackers per year.

The Christmas crackers or bonbons as we know them are opened by thousands of Australians sitting around the Christmas tables every year. These days they include a paper hat, small gift and some pretty bad jokes!