Mistletoe & Merry Crackers: Which Range Suits Your Table

We stock seven Mistletoe & Merry cracker collections, fourteen designs in all, running from $6.95 for a single pet cracker to $59.95 for a Deluxe tray. The choice is less about budget than about matching the cracker to the table you have already set. Look at your glassware and your candles before you look at the crackers.

Every collection is handmade in South Africa by Mistletoe & Merry, and every tube holds a paper hat and a joke. What is packed in beside them is where the collections part company. Most carry one gift worth keeping, the Games tray swaps that gift for paper plane materials, the pet crackers hold something for the animal instead, and a Crackertoa adds a confetti popper to the pull. Size, finish and how loudly the thing announces itself change as well, which makes this a decorating decision more than a shopping one. What follows works through it the way you would set a table, starting with the metal. Once you have decided, the whole shelf is laid out on the Christmas bon bons page.

Start with the metal, not the cracker

Most Australian Christmas tables already have a metal running through them before a single cracker is laid down. The cutlery. The candle holders. The rim on the good glasses, and the baubles if the tree is close enough to sit in the same eyeline. Choose the cracker that agrees with that metal and the table looks composed. Choose the other one and the crackers read as something that turned up separately, because they did.

The Luxury Metallics pair exists for this exact fork in the road. Metallics Gold Joy is warm, and sits with brass, timber, cream linen and anything lit by candle. Metallics Silver Mistletoe is cool, and sits with stainless cutlery, white china, plain glass and a table carrying more grey than gold. Both are $49.95 a tray. If you cannot pick between them, open the cutlery drawer, because that is the metal every guest will have in their hand for two hours.

Then the finish, which the light decides

A foiled cracker is built to catch light from a low, warm source. Indoors, with candles lit and the blinds half down, foil does the most work of any finish in the range: it picks up the flame and throws it back down the table. Outdoors at midday in December it does the opposite. Full sun flattens a metallic into a bright patch with no pattern left in it, and a camera reads it as a white smear.

Matte and printed finishes hold their detail in any light. That is why Festive Kraft Nutcracker Icons suits lunch on the deck better than a metallic does, and why it also suits a table built on greenery and linen rather than tinsel. Kraft is $49.95 for twelve crackers of about 30cm, so one box seats twelve and a petite tray covers the two spares every table needs.

The seven collections, and the table each one is for

Prices are per tray unless the row says otherwise. Sizes are the maker's, rounded, and where a tray count is not given below it is on the product page.

Buying one collection, or mixing two

One collection down the whole table is the safe answer and it is not always the better one. A 33cm cracker in front of a five-year-old is a wrestling match, and twelve identical crackers down a long table can end up looking like a place setting rather than a party.

The rule that keeps a mix looking deliberate is worth writing on the shopping list: hold one design family steady and let the size change. Festive Kraft Nutcracker Icons down the adult end with Petite Mini Nutcrackers at the children's end reads as one table, because the same nutcracker runs through both and only the length has changed. Gold Joy beside a tray of Crackertoa Colour Pop does not, because the two are arguing about what kind of lunch this is meant to be. If the brights are what you want, commit to them and run Colour Pop the length of the table.

The exception is the Pets pair. Both are $6.95, both are sold on their own, and what falls out is not a trinket either: dog-friendly treats in one, a pet-safe toy in the other. They match nothing else on the table and they are not meant to. Buy one per animal and leave them out of the colour decision.

How many, and how long the choice stays open

Counts are a separate question from collections, and we have costed them by seat elsewhere. The short version is one cracker per seat plus two spares; the long version is worked through by table size. What matters for the choice above is that these designs are made in set runs. A tray that sells out in November is gone until the next season, so the range you are choosing from in the second week of December is a smaller one than the range in front of you now.

If the spring-loaded boxes are the ones you keep returning to, the mechanism is explained on its own, including what confetti does to a table that already has plated food on it.

Ordering, and keeping them until December

A cracker has no clock on it. Nothing in the tube spoils, so a tray bought now is the same tray in December, and the only real enemy is pressure. Give the box a shelf of its own rather than the bottom of a pile, and do not let it ride around in a car through a hot week. A tube that has been sat on pulls badly and a folded one will not pull at all, which is a graceless way to lose the one item on the table that everybody touches at the same moment.

Everything here is picked and packed by hand at our warehouse in Corio, just outside Geelong. Put a weekday order in before 12pm and it is dispatched that day on a tracked Australia Post service. Orders over $100 travel free anywhere in the country, and a tray takes up more room in a carton than it adds to the scales, so it is a cheap thing to tuck in beside the rest of a Christmas order.

The date that decides everything is not ours. Australia Post publishes its Christmas deadlines in October, and the further a parcel has to travel the earlier its door shuts, so a regional or interstate address needs a longer run-up than a metro one. Work backwards from that and the middle of December is the honest last call for anything that has to be sitting on the table on the day.

Questions about the Mistletoe & Merry collections

What is the difference between the Mistletoe & Merry cracker ranges?

Size, finish and price mostly, and in three of the seven, what comes out of the tube. Every collection is handmade in South Africa and every tube holds a paper hat and a joke. Petite runs about 18cm, six to a tray at $19.95. Festive Kraft is about 30cm, twelve to a tray at $49.95. Crackertoa is about 33cm and $39.95 for six, with a confetti popper in place of the usual snap. Games is about 30cm and $39.95 for six, holding paper plane materials rather than a gift. Luxury Metallics is foiled at $49.95 and Deluxe patterned at $59.95, both with the count on the product page. The Pets crackers are about 35cm and sold singly at $6.95, with dog-friendly treats in one and a pet-safe toy in the other.

Should I buy gold or silver Christmas crackers?

Match the metal already on the table rather than the one on the tree. Metallics Gold Joy belongs with brass, timber and warm candlelight. Metallics Silver Mistletoe belongs with stainless cutlery, white china and plain glass. When the cutlery is the only metal in the room, follow the cutlery, since it is the thing in everybody's hand.

Which Christmas crackers suit an outdoor lunch?

Printed and matte finishes rather than foiled ones. Full midday sun flattens a metallic and leaves none of the pattern visible, while kraft and colour-printed designs look the same on a deck as they do indoors. Festive Kraft Nutcracker Icons and Crackertoa Colour Pop are the two that hold up best outside, and the Crackertoa confetti is easier to deal with on paving than on a rug.

Pick the metal first, let the size follow the seats, and what is left is only how loud you want the table to be. All seven collections sit together on the Christmas bon bons shelf, a $6.95 cracker for the dog at one end of it and a $59.95 Deluxe tray at the other.