Printable cracker

A fun Christmas activity – print your own Christmas cracker. There are three versions, Santa on a bike, Christmas trees, and a blank one for you to do your own thing.

What you will need

A functioning printer, and card or paper you can print on. It will work fine with paper but will be less rigid than card. A3 might be ideal, but most of us don’t have an A3 printer, so A4 will work too, it will just be smaller. Also scissors, and if you want to colour them in, art materials.

Instructions

1. Print with as small a margin as your printer will manage. The files are at the end of this post. I’d recommend the pdfs if they will work for you, but I’ve supplied image files as an alternative.

2. Fold along the six dotted lines, as it’s easier to do the folding before you start cutting. Hopefully it’s fairly obvious which folds go which way – you should end up with two ‘ridges’. See my photo for vague and approximate guidance.

3. With just the two dotted lines folded (the ones in the middle of the three at each end – if that makes sense) cut out the solid line sections with scissors. You should be able to cut through two layers of paper so you’re cutting out a diamond shape each time. Really tricky to explain.

4. You can colour it at any point, but perhaps best to colour after cutting in case you spend ages colouring then do the cutting wrong and it ends up in pieces…

5. Gather whatever is going into the cracker. Could be a hat, a joke you write yourself, chocolate, anything*! [*That will fit in, you have available, etc etc]

6. Then roll the cracker as best you can into the cracker shape and stick with tape. Glue might work I suppose, but I wouldn’t advise it.

7. It won’t go ‘bang’, so you’ll have to shout that.

Downloadable pdf files

Santa cracker (A4 pdf)

Christmas trees cracker (A4 pdf)

Blank cracker (A4 pdf)

Downloadable .png files

Santa cracker (.png image file)

Christmas trees cracker (.png image file)

Blank cracker (.png image file)