Why Do Christmas Crackers Come With Paper Crowns?

George Bernard Shaw is said to have quipped that Britain and America are two countries separated by a common language. But around the holidays, there is at least one more way in which these two nations differ: Only Brits eat their Christmas dinner wearing flimsy paper hats.

It’s a sight that’s probably most familiar to Americans thanks to festive scenes in quintessentially British movies, such as Bridget Jones’ Diary and About A Boy. To British people, however, the festive paper hat is as much a part of the big day as roast turkey (rather than ham) and the king’s (rather than the president’s) speech.

1. What Is a Christmas Cracker?
2. A Brief History of Christmas Crackers
3. Adding the Crown

What Is a Christmas Cracker?

These crown-shaped paper hats are found inside Christmas crackers, traditional festive novelties—far more popular in the UK than the U.S.—that are typically placed on the Christmas dining table or hidden among the decorations on the Christmas tree. Each one consists of a small cardboard tube containing an array of silly throwaway prizes (including a paper hat), which is in turn wrapped inside a longer roll of brightly colored paper and often fastened with decorative ribbons or foil bows.

Running through the cracker is a thin firecracker-like “banger,” containing a tiny explosive patch of a friction-sensitive chemical called silver fulminate. When the time comes, neighboring diners at the Christmas dinner table grab one end of the cracker and wrench it apart, with the banger producing a loud “crack” sound as it snaps open. The winner is the person whose side of the torn cracker remains attached to the tube that contains the prizes, which they then get to keep.

A Brief History of Christmas Crackers

Christmas crackers date back to the mid-1800s, when a London confectioner named Tom Smith first began adding paper mottos (originally short love poems) into packets of sugared almonds that he sold in twisted tissue-paper packets from his shop on Goswell Road in Clerkenwell.

The idea of adding an explosive “crack” to the equation apparently came to Smith when he heard the loud pop of a log burning in his fireplace, and he spent years concocting a way to safely replicate the surprising sound in his novelty bonbon packets. He patented his first design in 1847, and gradually honed the abrasive mechanism needed to explode his silver fulminate banger until the 1860s—during which time his novelty crackers became the talk of the city. By the end of the 19th century, his business was employing some 2000 staff.

Adding the Crown

Smith may have come up with both the Christmas cracker itself and its eponymous “crack,” but it was apparently his son who added the paper hat into the mix, alongside a handful of other novelty items. The prizes included in Smith’s crackers needed to be light and compact, so in that respect a tissue-paper hat might seem like a sensible choice. But why make it crown-shaped?

The festive crown actually has a far longer heritage than the Christmas crackers in which it’s now found. According to the BBC, the hat wearing can be traced to the ancient Romans’ Saturnalia festival, held in mid-December, “which also involved decorative headgear.” In the medieval era, the festive period from Christmas to Twelfth Night was a seen as a time of misrule, when a servant would be crowned as a “king” or “queen” and made to preside over the holiday season’s madcap celebrations. It seems that the addition of the paper crown to the Christmas cracker in the 1800s may have been a jokey nod to this age-old tradition of festive misrule, which we’ve maintained ever since.

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