Ah, it’s that time of the year again. Exploding ear drums, cracked windows and constantly tripping car alarms. Christmas celebration is never complete in this country without “fireworks” that are often more accurately described as “explosives.” Happy holidays!
Imagine the juvenile obsession with fireworks that grips America in late June and early July, but without any of the rules about what can’t be set off where. It’s that adolescent instinct to find the most dangerous possible way to have fun, without a cranky adult coming along to tell everyone to cut it out and go home. Vendors on just about every corner, with no permit or license, are selling fireworks to adults, kids, teenagers, or anyone that can pay for them. And it’s not like in the United States people want the brightest colors and craziest designs that Chinese fireworks makers can come up. Here it’s just the bang. And it hurts the ear drums. It really does.
My mother-in-law’s neighbor Lenin a few years back into a competition with the guys on the block to see who could set off the loudest firecracker. That cracked the car window of a cousin who was parked on the block. He was pissed, and didn’t come back for a few days. Everyone thought the whole incident was really funny. Just about everyone.
“Eso siempre me ha parecido una diversion medio guevona,” said Isa’s uncle Freddy, commenting on what dumb way that was to have fun.
I remember the first December in Venezuela, 12 years ago, when I came to go backpacking with my brother. We went with some friends to a “patinata” outside of Caracas, where kids rode skateboards down a very steep hill, while sitting down or lying down. And the kids spiced up the event by sprinkling the place really loud firecrackers that had cute names like the matasuegra (mother-in-law-killer) or the tumbarancho (shack destroyer) which after 9/11 was dubbed the bin Laden. We pretty quickly learned to look around us every minute or so to make sure one of those things didn’t go off behind us, because it really did impair the hearing. An hour into the fun some kids decided to put an entire stack of them on top of a nearby transformer. They all went off at the same time, knocking out power on the entire block. We fled the scene of the crime.
“Go to a clinic right now and what you’ll find are kids with burned fingers,” one nurse told me at a party one December. Every year stories of explosions and fires and fireworks warehouses start popping up in the news. Then they go away, and come back again the next December.
A little over a week and the firecrackers get put away until next year. As usual, 2011 will end with a bang.
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