<p><a href="http://www.diaryofalatebloomer.com/wp-content/uploads/2010/12/Crackers.jpg"><img class="alignleft size-medium wp-image-2916" title="OLYMPUS DIGITAL CAMERA" src="http://www.diaryofalatebloomer.com/wp-content/uploads/2010/12/Crackers-300x224.jpg" alt="" width="300" height="224" /></a>Each Christmas, my mother bakes Christmas Jell-O Cake for dessert.  It sounds bizarre, but it's soooooo delish.  My sister and I flip for this cake. </p>

<p><br class="spacer_" /></p>

<p>Years back, Mom started incorporating Christmas crackers into the dessert ceremony.  They are a British tradition, and we're Portuguese, so I'm trying to figure how this whole cracker thing started.  I think it's because I was obsessed with Camelot at the age of 3 (strange), slipped into an English accent at restaurants as a kid (stranger), and faithfully watched <em>Masterpiece Theatre</em> as a teenager (strangest).  In other words, I was an odd kid.  Mom susses that I was some sort of Englishwoman in a past life.  Even though she doesn't believe in past lives. </p>

<p><br class="spacer_" /></p>

<p>In case you haven't figured it out yet from the photo, Christmas crackers are not something you put cheese on and scarf down as an appetizer before the Christmas goose.  (Does anyone really eat Christmas goose???)<strong>  </strong><a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Christmas_cracker" target="_blank"><strong>A Christmas cracker</strong></a><strong> </strong>is a cardboard tube that is decorated with festive paper.  When it is pulled and twisted, it pops open with all sorts of cheap plastic crapola and tiny pieces of fortune cookie-esque paper with bad jokes in lieu of fortunes.  There is also a paper crown that you wear on your head so that you look like a dufus.   My family finds all of this amusing.  And no, we're not drinking heavily during the cracker commotion.  Although I recall Mom being a little toasty during last year's cracker session. </p>

<p><br class="spacer_" /></p>

<p>This year, I received a plastic frog that I raced with Auntie I's smaller plastic frog that was inside her cracker.  Her frog won.  Later that night, I found both frogs on my bedroom dresser in the humping position -- the work of either my brother-in-law or my truly twisted uncle, I presume. </p>

<p><br class="spacer_" /></p>

<p>I also unearthed a pink paper crown and a truly awful joke:  "Someone stole all the toilets in the Police station.  The Police have nothing to go on."  Ba-dump-bump. </p>

<p><br class="spacer_" /></p>

<p>Have any of you ever cracked open the Christmas crackers? </p>