All Posts

There’s a certain type of person who comes alive around a good mystery. Not because they want to rush to the ending, but because they love the journey  of it — the noticing, the second-guessing, the slow assembling of pieces until the picture finally clicks into place. They’re the one who pauses mid-sentence and says, “Hang on… didn’t he say earlier that—”. The one who clocks a throwaway detail and quietly files it away for later. You know the type… You might be the type! Mys

There are some things you expect to be loud at Christmas: your aunt after her second sherry, the King’s Speech if someone sits on the remote, and the annual row about whether bread sauce is “a real thing” or “just beige wallpaper paste”. What probably doesn’t need to be deafening is… the table decoration. And yet, every year we line up our Christmas crackers like tiny cardboard grenades, brace for impact, and pretend the resulting BANG plus a plastic keyring shaped like a fl

A professional guide to creating beautiful handmade crackers at home Introduction Hi, I’m the Head Cracker Goblin here at Cracking Games Co. We’ve handmade hundreds of Christmas crackers while prototyping our designs — testing every kind of card, paper, and finish along the way. So, it’s safe to say we know a thing or two about how to make a really good cracker. Of course, our finished products are all professionally printed, die-cut, and creased, which is a fascinating proce

For all our grown-up seriousness, there’s something heartening about how easily that spark of play comes back when Christmas gives us the rare excuse to slow down and enjoy it. After spending all year managing calendars, budgets, and transport, your day can brighten almost instantly the moment a trivia card or tiny puzzle appears on the table. And maybe it’s not just the play itself — maybe it’s the way it brings a little joy to the people around us. As adults, so much of Chr

Christmas is a wonderful time of year — twinkly lights, cosy dinners, the annual hunt for the good  baubles — but it’s also spectacularly wasteful. Every December, the UK unleashes 227,000 miles of wrapping paper  into the world, enough to circle the planet nine times ( GWP Packaging, 2025 ). And that’s before we get to the glitter-coated gift bags, shiny bows, and the plastic moustache from a cracker that will outlive every human currently alive. But a greener Christmas does

Crackers Gone Stale In a development that will shock precisely nobody who’s ever wrestled a flimsy paper hat onto a relative’s head, the British Christmas cracker has officially lost its snap. Once the centrepiece of festive drama, it’s now little more than an annual ritual of disappointment: the faint pop, the polite laughter, and the inevitable plastic moustache destined for landfill by Boxing Day. And yet, the ritual endures. According to Statista’s 2024 Christmas retail f