Making Christmas crackers!
Making Christmas crackers!
If you want to get all Martha Stewart, you can do this at home. You will need
- teeny cool prizes (here in Lawrence, The Toy Store is an excellent source of these, but any discount/dollar store will have some cool stuff)
- colored tissue paper
- card stock or other stiff paper
- regular paper and access to a printer and computer
- tape and a glue stick (one or the other will work, but I'm picky)
- Christmas wrapping paper
- Curling ribbon or yarn
Okay,
Christmas crackers are little packages that typically contain a little
prize, a paper crown, and a joke or riddle. The store-bought kind snap
when you open them, but I haven't figured out how to make the homemade
kind do that (chime in if you have ideas that won't get the Bureau of
Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms involved); the bonus is, the prizes are
less lame. Here's what you do:
- Make the jokes/riddles
- Go online and find cheesy jokes (optionally holiday-themed) -- the more corny, the better.
- Copy/paste them into a document (optionally adding holiday clip art), print them out, and cut them out as small slips or squares of paper
- Make the paper crowns
- Cut the tissue paper into long strips that are about 8" wide
- Cut each strip in half the long way, using a zig-zag cut. You will have two long 4" strips that are zig-zagged on one side.
- Cut/glue/tape
strips of tissue paper (glue stick works best) to about 23.5 inches
(that's the size of an adult XL hatband, so you should be covered no
matter who gets 'em).
- Glue or tape the strips together into loops to form a crown.
- Make the tubes
- Tube size will vary depending on how big your prizes are, but if you get small stuff, a tube 5 inches long and 1.5 inches in diameter will work great. You can use bath tissue tubes or cut paper towel tubes to size, OR you can make tubes out of stiff paper. I used card stock cut, rolled and taped (these don't have to be especially sturdy).
- Assemble
- Fold up the crowns, and place one crown, one joke/riddle, and one prize in each tube.
- Wrap
- Cut wrapping paper so it's about 6 inches wider that the tubes you've made (you'll want at least 3 inches on each side).
- Roll each tube in wrapping paper and glue/tape the edge of the paper closed.
- Twist each end like a wrapped candy.
- Use ribbon or yarn and tie off the ends with double knots (prevents peeking, and looks festive).
That's
it! Deliver them to friends and family. It's good to open these in a
group of people, so you can read the jokes to one another, wear the
crowns, and trade your prize for someone else's if theirs looks better.
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