New Years Eve in Limhamn (31 Dec)

This was our second NYE in Sweden and we had some great memories of the massive firework show last year and some disappointment that we missed out on firing our own.

This year we also had some extra guests, Kristine's parent, Peter and Heather, were staying with us and were keen to set off some of their own explosions.

Fireworks are illegal for public use all year round, except for 6pm til about 3am on New Years Eve.  So in the days after Christmas lots of little pop-up shops appear with their selections of fireworks.  This year there were a few less as some of the companies didn't sell them due to protests that they were scaring pets.

So when we got back from Rovienemi, we took Peter down to the firework shop and he made some selections:

Svea Fireworks

In the end, he spent about 1800kr ($300) on a decent selection - a bag of bombs and crackers, a bag of single fireworks and a firework box that promised 1 firework a second for 90 seconds.

The selection

Of course I made my customary Oreo Cheesecake, so after dinner and cheesecake we headed down to the park around 7pm and set of our fireworks:

I like the trails on this one

One of the sparkers

The bombs and crackers were pretty cool - some were only little pops and crackles but some fired off a lot of exploding bits like the one above.  We had a mini-tank that fired a cannon of sparks, and after firing seemed to be completely undamaged, so we made it our goal to blow it up:

Somehow it managed to survive that explosion and the next few that we tried...


Here's one of the crackling sparkers:

One of the ones was a spinning disk that ended up flying up and off.  It narrowly missed the bag of fireworks (which could have been interesting) and landed in a tree:

There were a few minor mishaps, like this firework that fired downwards instead of up, or the couple that were staked too deep and didn't take off, but overall no limbs or digits were lost (despite the screams).

The kids ended up pretty tired and grumpy by around 10pm so we put them to bed.  At midnight we had the usual 360-degree firework show that ran for about an hour.  The highlight was the guy down the road placing a fireworks box on the kerb.  It fired about 2 or 3 shots and then fell onto the road and began shooting fireworks into the house across the road (again, luckily no-one was hurt):

I can't post up any videos of the main fireworks as they were too big to go up on here.

All in all it was a great night with plenty of explosions.

Here's to a great 2017!