How to Make a Christmas Cracker | Free Template and Tutorial

Here in Australia, Christmas crackers (AKA bon-bons) are a huge part of our Christmas celebrations.

They make an appearance on the table at almost every Christmas dinner we attend, ready to be ripped apart, so the “winner” can wear their paper crown prize with pride. The jokes are always terrible, the gifts are usually ridiculously small and cheap, but they are much loved and are a Christmas tradition for so many families around the world.

A few years ago,  one of my aunts started making her own DIY Christmas crackers for our family gatherings. They still had the traditional bad jokes and paper crowns, but the miniature gifts were personalized, and were far more interesting (sometimes we even scored some money inside!)

This inspired me to create a Christmas cracker template so you can get crafty and make your own crackers too! It’s a really nice way to personalize the experience and you can fill them with whatever you want!

I’ve created a series of 8 Christmas cracker templates that you can download and color in (because coloring just makes them even more fun!) or you can grab the free Christmas cracker template that we’ve used in this tutorial below.

The traditional Christmas cracker includes a “cracker snap” to make a bang when it’s pulled apart – but I haven’t included one in this tutorial because I think these crackers are too nice to be pulled apart – I’ll be using them as a special gift box under the tree instead! But if you do want to add a cracker snap, you can purchase them from Amazon.

I printed my template on 200GSM card stock in this tutorial, because I wanted to make a strong cracker for under the tree. But you can also use standard printer paper, especially if you’re planning to rip them apart!

If you’re using thicker card, it’s a good idea to score your paper before folding. I just used a paperclip, compass or scissors (carefully!) and ruler to do this, but you can purchase proper scoring equipment (like this one on Amazon – affiliate link) if you prefer. It’s not necessary to score standard printer paper.

This Christmas cracker is also designed to have distinct, flat sides, however, if you don’t fold the horizontal lines, you can create a cylinder-shaped cracker instead. This is totally up to you!

Let’s jump into the instructions!

Other posts you might like: How to Make a Christmas Ornament // How to Make a Christmas Gift Box

If you’re the kind of person who prefers video instructions, you can check out my original Christmas cracker blog post for a step-by-step video guide using my old template, which is no longer available, but the only obvious difference is that the old template had 5 sides, but this template has 6. Otherwise, the instructions are the same!

I hope you enjoy making these coloring Christmas crackers! Tell me what you think in the comments and please use the links below to share with your friends or save this post for later.