These past two weekends we’ve driven interstate (to PA and NH) to buy fireworks for our annual backyard (in Rochester) celebration. As always, it’s a lot of fun seeing the variety of product available and imaging the fun of setting it off.
The above – 16000 little firecrackers (what we used to call ‘crazy jacks’ in my youth) – is about as big as the wheel on your typical car. Imagine the noise and smoke as this thing went off. Wouldn’t it be incredible?
And the above – an $860 assortment – is 60 shells that would produce effects similar to what you’d see at a professional show. It still amazes me that in some states you can just buy this stuff and let it off in your backyard. While we bought a few launching fireworks, they’re very tame and neither go high or produce much noise.
Speaking of noise: 750 missiles! This thing takes more than two minutes to fire all the missiles, and each missile whistles and then bangs in the air. While it would be spectacular, I imagine this would be the sort of thing that may have the neighbors calling the rozzers in our suburb (since these sorts of things are currently illegal in our county).
The packaging of the bigger fireworks is always wonderful, and here I focus on a few of the genre ones (although in 2023 a reference to the ‘Majestic 12’ is a bit esoteric). Here’s a few others:
Can you spot the blatant copyright infringement on two of the above? If it’s not obvious, here’s some that is:
The label designer obviously have fun with these products (which, remember, are designed to be set on fire), and every now and then there are head-scratching examples like this one:
We bought a bunch of items from several shops, and our ‘show’ promises to be a good one. At Joyce’s request we tried to only buy low-noise fireworks, and that included this selection of fountains we’ve got:
We’ve had one or two low noise fountains before (they mostly make a low hiss due to the sparks coming out) so it will be interesting seeing what these are like.
That said it’s possible that some of the fountains we got may make a few crackles, but for obvious reasons how could we pass on…
…a skull and a spinning snake?!? Imagine if such things had been available when we were kids?
I also can’t resist a good sword (handheld fountains, basically) and you know there was no chance I’d pass up this lightsaber firework!
And this is just a selection of what we’ll be lighting up on Tuesday. As usual I’ll try to catch the excitement in pictures and maybe video and follow up later in the week 🙂
