Everyone loves to pull a cracker. It�s all part of the fun of Christmas. The originator of the cracker was a man called Tom Smith who owned a sweet shop in London.

Tom had a good eye for business. He also had a sense of humour. �What people like,� he used to say, �is something new. And if it�s not new, the art is to find a way of selling it!�

During the 1840�s Tom found that people liked sugar almonds, but while he was on holiday in France he came across a variety of sweets wrapped up in a twist of paper. These bonbons seemed very popular, so Tom decided to copy the idea to wrap his sugar almonds. The new wrapping made the sweets look rather special. They sold well. Then Tom noticed that young men were buying them to give to their sweethearts. He began placing �love mottoes� on small slips of paper inside the sweet wrapping. This novelty sold even better than Tom had expected. People went out of their way to visit his shop and buy this new kind of sweet.

In 1846 Tom turned his thoughts towards Christmas. Instead of sweets, why not wrap little toys and novelties in the twisted wrapping? Tom experimented and hit on the idea of producing a wrapping that could be pulled apart � just like the cracker as we know it today.

As he had hoped, the Christmas novelty was a success, but Tom was still not satisfied. One evening he was standing idly in front of the fire. As he kicked a log into place there was a shower of sparks and the log cracked and popped making Tom jump. �That�s it!� he laughed to himself. �What I need is something in my wrapping that will make a �snap� when it is pulled open�.

For some months he worked with several chemicals until at last he found one that was safe, easy to make, and would make a noise just loud enough to amuse his customers and not frighten them.

The new �crackers� were a sensation and soon making them became a full-time business. Tom had to open a factory to produce them. Today the Tom Smith factory sell crackers all over the world, and the man who liked to amuse his customers would be amazed to know that his sense of fun had started a Christmas tradition.