Fourth of July

I thought I would take a break from the exploits of raising my children and tell yinz about some of my experiences when growing up, especially holidays.  Maybe by looking at some of my childhood experiences it might lend some perspective on how I am screwing up my own children.

The Fourth of July is one of those strange holidays for me.  It is absolutely one of my favorites, but it is also one of the hardest for me to really get into celebrating, especially when it is in the middle of the week.  When I am at home, I generally cook out and then take the kid(s) to see fireworks.  No biggie.

However, on the occasion that the fourth is on a weekend, then I pack the family up and head back to my hometown for the Fourth done right.  My family takes the phrase "celebrate the independence of your nation by blowing up a small part of it" not as a clever saying, but as a challenge.  We all go to Grandma's house (I have a VERY large extended family) at the top of the hill at the end of a one way in, one way out, street.  It isn't isolated, but not crowded either.  She has a decent sized yard with a pool and two of her neighbors are relatives, so we pretty much have run of the place.

When I was growing up, my uncles used to have a fireworks "war" with the not related to neighbors.  This wasn't who could put on a better show, but who could come closest to blowing the other one up.  They would chuck crab apples stuffed with M80's (not kidding) over the evergreen trees and into the neighbors yard.  The neighbors would then return fire.  Bottle Rockets and Roman Candles were used as projectile weapons.  It was, in a word, ludicrous.  I think it finally stopped once all of the "adults" had enough small children running around that they thought maybe it wasn't such a good idea.

My favorite year was the year that sanitary sewer was being installed in the street.  My uncle got a brilliant idea to use an 8' section of PVC sewer pipe as a cannon.  He shoved a volleyball in one end and an M80 in the other and the results were spectacular.  That volleyball had to have flown 200 yards.  It was great until they blew a hole in the PVC pipe and thus ended that game.

Nowadays my relatives put on a very good backyard fireworks show, I'm probably not giving them enough credit here for how good it actually is, but none of what they do compares what the crazy bastard did in the video below.  This person flew a drone with a camera into a fireworks display.  And it is amazing, probably illegal and very dangerous, but amazing.