Baby Jesus, Three Wiseman, and Illegal Fireworks

Now that the Christmas season is upon us I’ve been reminiscing about the holidays a bit. I plan on sharing a few of those stories with you over the next few days.

Today I’ll start with the tale of the Christmas fireworks. You read that correctly….fireworks. I don’t mean family feuds that take place over the holidays. I’m talking about Roman candles, bottle rockets, firecrackers, etc. Oh my…hillbillies can ring in Christmas like nobody else.

I grew up in a fireworks-free state. Yep, fireworks were and still are illegal in the great state of Virginia. Does that stop anyone? Hmmph! Hillbillies are not afraid of the law…we laugh in the face of the law.

My family had a long standing Christmas Eve tradition. While the females finished up dinners, shopping, and wrapping gifts, the men headed across the border into Tennessee to buy the illegal stuff of kids’ Christmas dreams.

We would gather at my grandmother’s house on Christmas Eve and sometime around 9:00 or 10:00 o’clock that night my father and his two drunken brothers would wander outside and start blasting fireworks. What’s more fun than fireworks? Fireworks being lit by drunken grown ass men. Ever seen a drunken man run from a rocket after he lights it? Let me tell you that it puts the “cheer” in holiday cheer.

I really miss those days. Christmas…drunkenness…potentially lethal and/or physically maiming actions. That says fun!!!

This tradition carried onto the youth of my now 24-year old nephew. Every Christmas Eve my father, brother, and nephew would pile into Daddy’s pickup and make a run for the border. That night after the sun had set we would head out to the backyard to start the festivities.

I’ll never forget how my nephew’s face would light up as Roman candles vomited those glowing orbs of goodness into the cold, dark sky. How he would squeal with delight as the bottle rockets blasted off like the Gemini space capsules of the the 60s. How he would run in circles of delight as we lit entire packs of firecrackers and threw them on the ground.

Then one fateful year we set off some sort of demon rocket. He clapped his little hands as it launched into the sky. Then…it…disappeared!! OH SHIT!

Let me explain that I grew up in the town limits of an old company town. That means that most all houses inside the town limits were rows and rows of homes that looked alike and were built very close together. To better explain…you couldn’t take a piss in your yard without about 10 neighbors seeing you take the whiz.

So here were are in the dark, shooting off illegal balls of fire, around homes that were built roughly 100 years ago. Needless to say…we gathered up all the evidence, ran in the house, locked the doors, and turned off all the lights. We sat huddled by the police scanner waiting with baited breath to hear the fire department called out on Christmas Eve to douse the flames of someone else’s home or to hear the police called out to investigate the shenanigans of a bunch of fireball toting hillbillies.

The police scanner was silent. Whew…we were safe!! That rocket was gone and would never be seen or heard from again.

The next morning (Christmas morning) we received a call from my brother. He was at his in-law’s home, which was located about 100 yards from my parents’ home up on a hill. He called to inform us that when they arrived they found that fateful rocket stuck in his in-law’s front yard!! That bastard rocket had come back to haunt us!!!

I thought my mother was going to have a damned heart attack. We had nearly burned down the home of my sister-in-law’s parents. Needless to say…we’ve never shot of fireworks again.

Christmas Eve is now on a shell of what it once was because we’re now afraid to laugh in the face of the law. I guess we’ve become a bit civilized over the years. Nah, we were scared into civilization that cold Christmas day. We all still have the memories though and memories never die.

Chick out…