Not surprisingly, it was aVictorian who invented the Christmas Cracker. Tom Smith to be precise. He was a baker from Clerkenwell London, who in 1840 discovered the individually wrapped bon bon (sugared almond in waxed paper) while on holiday in Paris.
He marketed these sweets around Christmas and found them to be very successful as love tokens from young men to their sweethearts.
Now - this is where it gets a bit confusing. It may be that, inspired by fortune cookies, he started to include little messages of love in the wrapping of the sweet, but it appears that fortune cookies were actually invented in California in the early part of the nineteenth century. Perhaps his inspiration was the moon cake, originating in China an awfully long time ago. On the top are imprinted the Chinese characters for "longevity" or "harmony". Or perhaps his idea came from Chinese fire crackers, and the motto part had nothing to do with China at all? If anyone could enlighten me on this, I would be extremely grateful. However it happened his new prettily wrapped sweets with words of love included were a great success - again over the Christmas period.
The final piece of marketing genius fell into place when he was kicking around the house, desperately trying to think of a new gimmick. A dormant spark from the fire crackled into life when he kicked it (or in an alternative story he was watching the sparks from a log in the fire) et voila - the idea for a sparking suprise came to him. After some time developing a system whereby the paper wouldn't ignite, he launched his "Bangs of Expectation" or "Cosaques" (named after the crack of a Cossack's whip) in 1860. They became known as crackers in the following decade.
By the 1880s, Tom Smith's company had produced over 100 cracker designs and by 1900 a staggering 13,000,000 of them had been sold. The brand still exists but has no connection with the original family - it's been bought over a couple of times in recent years.
No comments:
Post a Comment