As a Brit living in the US there are a couple of things that I need to find to make the Christmas festivities complete. The first thing is a Cadbury's Christmas assortment...even though you can get them individually it's somehow so much more exciting to open the box, pull out the plastic tray, and decide which chocolate bar will be your next victim.

Next up is a box of Christmas crackers. For those of you unsure about what constitutes a cracker, it's essentially the cardboard tube from inside a roll of toilet paper, wrapped in colorful paper and containing a paper hat, a joke printed on a piece of paper, and some kind of gift (preferably something plastic and incredibly cheesy...like a miniature pair of maracas). A snap device is fed through the cracker so that when it is pulled apart it emits a bang. Good, clean fun that I can usually track down for about $13 a box...so you can imagine my shock when I saw the crackers below on The Conran Shop's site for $95. They're gorgeous (to the point where I couldn't bring myself to pull them apart)...hopefully stuffed with something appropriate to the increased price (though I doubt it)...and temporarily out of stock (there are obviously a lot of people who are willing to pay more than me to alleviate homesickness).

Before anyone says anything...I know...childhood regression...but isn't that what makes the holidays fun?