On Excess
We entered 2017 to a chorus of whistles, glittery explosions, pops and sizzles. Fireworks. Hours and hours worth of fireworks.
Just to keep you in the know – in South Africa, fireworks are pretty much illegal. The minority of people still shoot these pretties to celebrate the new year, but on the whole, it’s a big no-no where I come from. For the greater part of my life, I only saw fireworks on special occasions, and then never on a large scale.
You can imagine how weird it was when we came to Germany. Here, tradition dictates that you shoot away all the bad things from the last year, so that you start the new year with a clean slate. The fireworks start when the first early watch says it’s midnight and pretty much continues well into the next morning – this year, it was about 6 o’clock on January 1st.
We used to live in a country where fireworks are illegal. So imagine our surprise when we first saw different kinds of fireworks for sale in basically any shop you can imagine in Germany. Here, it’s a massive tradition to shoot fireworks on New Year’s eve (more than anywhere else I’ve ever heard of). The people believe that they’re shooting all the bad stuff from the last year away, so they can start the New Year on a clean slate. This means that millions of Euro’s are shot into the air, in one of the most spectacular fireworks displays I’ve seen in my life.