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

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