It's New Year's Eve in the Netherlands, and just as they did last year, the fireworks have started early in the morning. They're legal here, and unlike the US and other nations, pretty much everyone has them.
In Amsterdam a few years ago, I was amazed at the sheer number of fireworks been rolled out. Literally rolled out. When I arrived there for my first Dutch New Year's Eve, I saw people rolling these big, red wheels out onto the streets, the size of monster truck tires, and couldn't figure out what the heck they were until people started unrolling them. They were massive strings of firecrackers, literally thousands of them in each wheel, and when laid out they extended for ten to twenty meters. When set alight, they all go off in sequence, creating a cacophony unlike anything I'd ever heard. Everybody's got skyrockets, too, so they'll be going off all day, and pretty much all night. Suffice it to say that my dogs are not going to be happy about this, and that it will be difficult to drag them out of the house for their walkies today. In France the fireworks were more American-style, meaning that although a few people had their own, there was one big city-organized fireworks show at around 10:00 pm. What made it so spectacular was that living in Sauve, which essentially hasn't changed all that much since the Middle Ages, and is still in many ways a medieval village, the city turned off all the street lights just before the show began. THAT was magic, wandering around the streets in total darkness, just the way one would have had to do back *in* the Middle Ages, the only light coming from the fireworks overhead. But the best fireworks shows I ever saw were in Spain. It's a big fireworks producer, and Sitges just happened to have a guy living there who was considered a fireworks master, and was referred to by the Spanish government as a "living treasure." He staged the most amazing shows I've ever seen, literally painting pictures in the sky, that would then shift and move and change, as if they were animated movies. It's an odd, ephemeral artform. All of the effort of design and planning, combined with the science of pyrotechnics, all going into something that is going to last only for a few seconds, long enough to make people go "Ooooooooo!!!" I'm not a big fan of the noisy ones, around here loud enough to be mistaken for bombs, but I like the pretty ones. Here's wishing everyone a nice fire-in-the-sky evening wherever you live, and a Happy New Year. May it be better than this one was...
