Christmas cracker tradition of wearing festive hats is believed to date back to Roman times and the Saturnalia celebrations, which also involved decorative headgear. Christmas crackers are also associated with Knut's parties, held in Sweden at the end of the Christmas season. The "Oxford English Dictionary" records the use of "cracker bonbons" and the pulling of "crackers" from 1847. Tradition tells of how Tom Smith of London invented crackers in 1847. He created the crackers as a development of his bon-bon sweets, which he sold in a twist of paper (the origins of the traditional sweet-wrapper). As sales of bon-bons slumped, Smith
Tom Morton-Smith Tom Morton-Smith Tom Morton-Smith, (born 1980) is an English playwright. Morton-Smith studied Drama at the University of East Anglia before training as an actor at the London Academy of Music and Dramatic Art. In 2006 he was selected to be part of Future Perfect, a writer's group attached to Paines Plough theatre company. In 2007 he joined the company as their playwright-in-residence. His debut stage play, Salt Meets Wound, premiered at Theatre 503 in May 2007. His play "Oppenheimer", about the physicist J Robert Oppenheimer and the building of the atomic bomb, was performed by the Royal Shakespeare Company in