Chapter Thirteen: New Year's Eve

Around Christmas time in December I had noticed lots of fireworks for sale in stores, in printed advertisements, and all over the place, but I did not think much of it at the time. Little did I know that the New Year’s Eve celebration in Germany was to be one of the most amazing experiences of my life. I just had never seen anything like it, ever before.

The afternoon of New Year’s Eve, we piled into our car and headed through a few towns over to a friend’s house in Steinenbronn, another small town in the area. We had been invited to a Mystery Dinner Party at their house that evening. The kids were going to watch movies and eat pizza in the family room while the parents ate a multi-course dinner in the adjacent studio apartment. As it drew close to midnight, the kids and adults all bundled up and headed outdoors to light sparklers and shoot off fireworks.

It was an excruciatingly cold night and so I grabbed coats and blankets and headed upstairs to the attic with my hostess, Vivian, and my two-year old daughter. We lugged an old chair over to the attic window and Grace, my daughter, climbed up onto it. Then we lifted open the large window to watch the firework show spread out below us.

Nothing had prepared us for the view in which we were about to partake. At the stroke of midnight, the few, sporadic fireworks suddenly exploded into a city-wide covering of shimmering lights. We could smell black powder and sulfur as bursts of lights fell in fountains over the orange-tiled rooftops. It was a stunning sight. The deafening sounds of explosions were all around and so close that in spite of the noise, we kept hearing the empty shells roll down the tile rooftop on either side of our attic window. A couple of times we even flinched thinking that the shells were going to shoot through the open window into the attic.

As we piled back into our car for the return drive home later, we were shocked to see almost each and every road covered with a layer of firework shrapnel and singed paper. We just had to drive right over the top of it all as there was no way to maneuver around and miss it. When we returned to our small town of Magstadt about a half-hour away, the situation was the same. And we drove home across roads littered with exploded fireworks that lay like a blanket across town. All I could think was, “Wow that is a ton of money in exploded fireworks. And who is going to clean all this up?”