Do they have bonfire night in NZ?

Yes, well kind off, they do now. We hope you all had a good bonfire night. With a great big conflagration and lots of 'ooohs' and 'ahhhs' and loud bangs. We love bonfire night! Always tell about that time we went to Marcus's annual bonfire night bash. You remember the one, where the rocket went up, the rocket got half way then went out, then started to pivot mid air 45o degrees as it began its fall back to earth, then re-ignited itself and proceeded to rocket back to earth, crashing with an enormous bang through a neighbours cat flap. Oh such happy days.

Anyway, yes they do do bonfire night over here, not as big though on the social calender. Fireworks are only for sale for 3 days before hand. You can imagine the monahan household, Sean to Jenn ' don't forget to buy some fireworks. You know you can only get them for three days' Jenn heard this so many times before she gave up and went shopping in the nick of time. It wasn't until she was buying them that next door pointed out that they weren't in the city now and were surrounded by livestock of all different varieties and the neighbours wouldn't be too happy if we went for a reenactment of the battle of the somme day one. So Jenn put back most of the contents of the shopping trolley and picked up a box of sparklers and what was described as roman candles. Lots of fizz but no bang, or so we thought.

Anyway, we gave up waiting for the sun to go down at 8.30pm (not forgetting we are hurtling towards summer solstice) and then got going with our cheap chinese fireworks. Lots of sparkley sparklers for the wee ones and sean lining up the 'Roman candles' (quotation marks intentional because they weren't, not as we know them anyway). Sean did his thing and up went the first one, poof BANG. horror struck silence as we waited, nothing else to do as we had already lit it, to continue, poof BANG and so on. No sounds of screaming, or thundering hooves as livestock stampeded so Sean, by now oblivious to anything but setting light to stuff and making it go bang, just carried on. Great. But a bit weird not having a bonfire or hot chocolate or it being really dark and cold. Oh well. Next year. Hope yours all went well and we are sad we missed it!

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