A cracker longer than an Olympic swimming pool, a 94-year-old choir and a man who sang carols for 42 hours. Plus the Christmas records your children can try to break.
Here’s a fact to win your Christmas quiz. The biggest Christmas cracker in the world wasn’t pulled in London, New York or Lapland. It was pulled in Chesham.
The Ley Hill monster
On 20 December 2001, Robin Carr and the children of Ley Hill School and Pre-School pulled a cracker that was 63.1 metres long and 4 metres across. That’s longer than an Olympic swimming pool.
Inside were balloons, toys, a 2.5-metre-wide paper hat and, of course, a joke. Guinness World Records still lists it as the largest Christmas cracker ever made. Twenty-five years on, nobody has beaten it.
We’d love to know what the joke was. If you were there, please tell us!
More festive record-breakers
- The oldest choir in the world is the Prime Timers Choir from Stratford-upon-Avon. Its 17 singers average 94.
- The biggest Christmas pudding weighed 3.28 tonnes. They made it in Aughton, Lancashire, in 1992. That’s about the weight of two cars.
- The tallest Christmas tree still growing in the ground is a giant redwood at Cragside in Northumberland. It stands 44.7 metres tall and gets decorated with lights.
- The longest Christmas cracker-pulling chain was 1,081 people at a school in Barnes, London.
Carols for 42 hours
Last December, Dave Purchase, who runs a sandwich shop in Gloucester, sang Christmas songs for 42 hours straight. That’s 684 songs. The record before that was 40 hours.
Our presenters do three-hour shows and then need a lie-down. Respect, Dave.
Your turn
Guinness World Records has a set of Christmas record titles just for under-16s. They include the most Christmas crackers pulled in one minute by a team of two, the most baubles thrown into a stocking in 30 seconds, and the fastest time to gift-wrap a Guinness World Records book. Have a look on the Guinness World Records Kids website.
And don’t forget our own challenge. In the Radio Christmas Snowman Challenge, two teams of pupils wrap a teacher in toilet roll, add a hat and a scarf, and stop the clock when the carrot goes in. The children at our projects in Guatemala have set the time to beat. Send us your school’s photo and time, and we’ll read out the leaderboard on air.
A record we’d love to break
The record that matters most to us isn’t in any book. It’s the number of children who get a safe place, a hot meal and someone who believes in them this Christmas.
Radio Christmas goes live on 1 December. Every penny you give goes straight to the projects in Central America that help over 800 children every week. Help us make this our best year yet.