Nasty little plastic toys?

Looking at the contents (or lack thereof) of modern Christmas Crackers and pondering life in light of what's inside them.

Over Christmas, I visited some people. Well, two to be precise. My mother-in law on Christmas Day for the extended family get together and feed; and a old friend on Boxing Day, for yet another feed. And of course, part of the whole Christmas experience is that you get to pull Christmas crackers with the people that you're eating your dinner with or the people that you're visiting. This is a long held “tradition” that is still upheld until this day. I'm thinking about it. What a bizarre tradition it is. You pay relatively large sums of money to buy little cardboard tubes (likely discarded toilet roll tubes) with a little cracking popper inside it. Two people pull on them. One on each end. Naturally. The thing makes a small bang. The really cheap ones don’t. They are duds.

Someone has a fleeting sense of victory when they're left holding the piece of cardboard tube that has within it the flimsiest of flimsy, ill-fitting paper hats that are almost transparent. In the past you would have had a little joke in there or a little riddle and a toy. A little cheap, tacky, plastic toy. Mass produced crap. So what I noticed this year was the crackers were still there on the table. They were still pulled in the traditional way. They still made that little snapping noise. Sometimes. Someone was still left holding the victory end. But the one thing that was missing in the crackers that I saw this year were the “toys.” At least in the crackers on the tables before me this Christmas.

There were no little games inside. There was the crappy hat. You still had the cheesy jokes. But there was no tacky toy. People were commenting on this in the assembly. I commented on it myself. They said "Where's the toy? They're doing away with the toys this year. What's going on? This is ridiculous. These things (the crackers) are expensive." People pay a lot of money for these little cardboard toilet roll tubes taken from recycled toilet rolls.

Some silver paper and some bows added if you're lucky. And inside they contain literally nothing. They're just hollow vessels. With a bad joke inside and a little paper hat and no toy. And now people were grumbling.

“There's no toy. I can't believe there's no toy. Where has the toy gone?”

But in reality when the toy was in the cracker people complained about that too. They said;

"This thing's useless. What am I supposed to do with this? It's cheap. It's nasty. It's tacky."

So when the toy was in the cracker people complained that it was useless and cheap and tacky. And now the toy is not in the cracker people are still complaining that there's no toy. And let's say there was a toy in the cracker.

What are you going to do with it? How many Christmas cracker toys have you kept over the years? Have you a little box you keep somewhere with all the Christmas cracker toys you've accumulated over the decades in it? Or do you simply look at the toy, poke around at it for a few minutes, realise it's a worthless piece of tat and then you throw it in the bin along with the toilet roll tube that makes up your cracker and the little spent banger part and the ribbons and badly fitting, easily torn flimsy paper hat.