Do you have an annual celebration with fireworks in your country?

November 5th, commonly known as Bonfire Night.
A custom that dates back to Guy Fawkes & the gunpowder plot, where he & his cohorts planned to blow up the houses of parliament.
Maybe it’s a celebration in hope that he/they had succeeded.

New Year’s Eve. It the celebration of a new calender year. It’s January 1. at midnight.

Here in Boston, USA we have a massive fireworks display over the Charles river for New Year’s Eve. There is always a big celebration with comedy and music in the Clamshell stage on the Charles River Esplanade. For the USA’s Birthday today (celebrating July 4, 1776), we have a great concert in the Clamshell with top-name bands with the pièce de résistance provided by the Boston Pops Orchestra. As the fireworks begin, the orchestra launches into the Pops’ now classic Independence Day rendition of Tchaikovsky’s “1812 Overture.” The whole thing is timed so the fireworks show, the music, and the Massachusetts National Guard with a row of 20 mm howitzers all reach their crescendo together at the stroke of midnight.

In Germany it happens midnight New Year’s Eve.

@mattbrowne I wrote midnight thinking of New Year’s eve, but it’s actually more like 9:30 PM for the 4th celebration.

Canada Day on July 1st. It celebrates the birth of our country (1867); Canada Day was originally called Dominion Day up until the 1980’s. There are fireworks displays across the country on the evening of Canada Day.

Also, in my city, we have the Calgary Stampede every summer (lasting 10 days). Each of those nights, there is a fireworks celebration at around 11:40 pm. It’s an event which has rodeo, exhibitions and festivities (with a lot of faire-ground games/rides). It started as an exhibition in the 1880’s and included the stampede by 1912. The Calgary Stampede is started by a parade through the down town core on the first day of the event. Our family has been part of the city for just over a century now, so there are a lot of stories, pictures and memories within. I was trying to upload a photo to Flickr of my great grandparents riding in the parade, holding my toddler grandma, on a horse-drawn wagon. But, alas, it is not on my computer any more!

And, of course, our country has the New Year’s Eve fireworks displays.

November 5th, Guy Fawkes’ Night or Bonfire night. Not sure if we’re celebrating the fact that Guy Fawkes got caught trying to blow up the Houses of Parliament, or at least that he tried.

Bonfire night is preceeded by at least a month of kids letting off fireworks in the streets just cos they think it’s “hard”.

We also have New Years Eve fireworks but thats a relatively new thing.

@ETpro – I used to like it, but there has been a shift from eye candy skyrockets to very loud, mindless boom-type fireworks. Most pets find this very troubling too.

My dog was about five months old when her first firework night came around. I took her for a walk that night, as though it was the most ordinary thing in the world. She was curious about the noise but not afraid of it, and she never was afraid the whole of her life. She would sit at the window watching them and occasionally barking back at them.

@mattbrowne It’s still the eye candy here, which I truly love. Of course, the Army Howitzers are all boom and smoke. Fortunately they are shooting blanks, so there are not exploding shells raining down on Cambridge on the other side of the Charles River.

Spoony THE Cat finds the local families fireworks displays, which do feature lots of big boomers, mildly interesting but not threatening. But then she’s lived for many years in Boston’s North End and every Parish there has their own Patron Saint’s fireworks display. It there ever were a mass shooting there, nobody would call the authorities, because they’d just assume it was fireworks.

@downtide Exactly. It has a lot to do with how old they are when they first encounter the loud noise and even more to do with how you react. They look to us for cues on how to process things they know they don’t understand.