One of my coworkers,
drdrew , told me I should blog about Christmas traditions from Argentina, where I grew up. So it's his fault I'm blogging.
The main thing I remember was that everyone set off fireworks on Christmas Eve and New Year's Eve. It was a lot of fun. We used to get a ton of firecrackers and set them off. The fun thing was to get someone to light a firecracker while you were holding it, and then you'd throw it into the air and watch it explode. Of course, we'd also throw Chinese firecrackers at people's feet and watch them jump around. Good times. One year one of the neighbors bought some bigger firecrackers. It was cool. He had a tube, like a mortar, and he'd drop a big ball (about the size of a baseball) into it, after lighting the fuse, and then we'd all run about 10 feet. It would explode, shoot into the sky, and then blow up with a huge crack and send sparks everywhere.
I learned some stuff about home made pyrotechnics. If you take a piece of steel wool and tie it to the end of a long piece of wire, you can set the steel wool on fire. Then you swing it around your head and it shoots off sparks all over the place. We'd do that in the street in front of my house. I don't think we ever set any cars on fire. Another one I heard about, that I never got to try, was that if you have some gunpowder, you can get a big bolt and a nut, and rub gun powder into the threads of the bolt. Screw on the nut, very carefully, and then you throw the bolt at the ground and it makes a bang. Another thing people used to do was take a bunch of the bigger firecrackers, stick them into a pipe or a can and then light the fuses. It makes a bigger explosion when the blast is contained. I figured out one time that I had an air compressor, I could take a huge wad of steel wool and trap it with a mesh in the tube, and blow air through the tube with the air compressor. I figured I'd be able to shoot sparks way up into the air, but never got a chance to try it.
One year I got a chemistry set for my birthday, and I was all excited. I had found a book that listed the ingredients for gun powder, so I was all set now. The only problem was that I needed nitrate of potassium, and I only had permanganate of potassium. Not knowing anything of chemistry, I shrugged, said what the heck, and tried it anyways. I ground down the ingredients, mixed them in the back yard, and then tried to blow it up. My goal was to make my own firecrackers that year. I think I was 12 or something like that. The first time I tried to blow up the gunpowder I used a piece of paper as a fuse, and did it in the back yard. Then I put some on a big rock in a vacant lot across the street and threw a stone at it to set it off. My last attempt was to manually set a match to a little pile of it inside the garage. Don't ask. I was dumb. None of the attempts worked. When I set a match to it it burned if I blew on it. Stunk though.
So those are my Christmas tradition stories.
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! IN THE NEXT 10 YEARS OR SO! BOOOOOYYYYYAAAAAHHHHHHHHHH!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! 
