Tomorrow is the 5th of November which is Guy Fawkes for us. This is a very odd celebration we have where we celebrate that A Mr Guy Fawkes (along with several other men) did not manage to blow up the British parliament building in 1605. I honestly don't know why we celebrate it really, but it's traditionally been a fun day where we let off fireworks, have a bonfire, and throw a 'guy' on the fire (the 'guy' being a fake person like a scarecrow with straw etc).
This is the biggest firework event in NZ. Sometimes there are new years fireworks done by councils etc, but not every year. The last few years there has been more and more talk about how terrible fireworks are. They hurt and scare animals, people use them irresponsibly, people get hurt, they're loud, the world is going to end (oh my!).
Previously we were able to get fireworks in most places. The supermarkets would have them, and shops like The Warehouse, Kmart etc had them (I think these places are similar to your Wallmart?).
Slowly there are more and more restrictions happening.
First they banned rockets. And I understood that, they were dangerous and caused many fires. Our house nearly caught on fire when I was young from a rocket from a neighbour's place that landed on our roof. The fire service said today that they hardly ever get called out now because they banned rockets.
Next they said shops could only sell them for 4 days, the 3 days before Guy Fawkes and the day of, up until a certain time. This has been in place for several years.
Then they were concerned that people were making sparkler bombs (sparklers are the fireworks you can hold onto and the end slowly burns, not sure if you call them this in the USA). So they said you can't buy sparklers on their own, only in a pack, because the big packs would have only one set of sparklers. So companies started selling 'sparkler packs' which consisted of a tonne of sparklers and one other firework lol.
And somewhere along the way they made it illegal to advertise fireworks.
Now many companies are being pressured not to sell fireworks. The only place I could find was Bad Boy Fireworks. Samuel turned up there today and found that they were sold out of most things, and had had a robbery overnight which made them have less stock. The only stock they had was very expensive and not worth buying.
Yesterday a teenager was being reckless with some fireworks and caused a large fire in a forestry block north of Christchurch that was difficult to fight with the strong winds. This had people once again talking about getting rid of public sales of fireworks altogether. They want only the large events to have access to them and no one else.
I suspect that in the next year or two this is exactly what will happen, we will not be able to buy them at all.
So next time you go to one of those awesome firework warehouses that you have, or buy any fireworks at all, remember us here in NZ as we suffer lol.
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