I personally H-A-T-E them.
Our new rescue dog, Toby, is scared every time one goes off.
For the last two weeks, I have been terrified taking him out for a pee lest one go off, and he bolts — he is big and strong.
Other pets and wildlife are traumatized by them too.
When my four boys were teens, I feared they would lose an eye playing with them.
They are also not great for the environment.
Sure they are a tradition, I thought on the Friday before Halloween, but so were a lot of things that we know better about now — like lead tinsel on Christmas trees and smoking pits at schools.
And then, on Saturday night, my husband went out for a smoke after dark (alas, I married one of the cute smoke pit boys).
Kids were setting off fireworks near our house, and he was close enough to see and hear them.
He reported they were teen boys setting off roman candles and laughing so hard they could barely stand. They were hooting with each small explosion and collectively groaning when one was a dud.
Reflecting on what he had seen and heard, we talked about how nice it was to hear teenagers laughing.
We acknowledged how hard these last two years have been on youth in this town.
We talked about how little there is to do for them at night here and how what they were doing wasn’t really damaging anything.
We waxed nostalgic: telling stories about how much fun we had as teens in our respective small towns doing the same thing.
We noted how innocent it was compared with what they could have been doing.
These kids near us hadn’t been drinking, by the sounds of it, and there would be no COVID-19 spread by what they were doing. They were outside, after all, and the fireworks seemed like relatively safe ones.
My husband reminded me that while I had always been nervous about our boys and fireworks, they had actually never gotten hurt and had great stories to tell about setting them off with friends and relatives. They tell of bonfires that followed with laughs and hot chocolate.
By Halloween, I had flipped and flopped on my wish to ban fireworks. Let them fly.
This is not to say there aren’t legitimate issues with them.
Animal-loving folks aren’t wrong about that.
So maybe a solution is a designated place in town where kids could go and get their fireworks fill for one or two nights, away from most houses and forests?
Especially with the world as it is now, it just doesn’t seem fair to add another thing to the long list of things teens in this town can’t do.
