Happy Guy Fawkes Day! & Happy Diwali!

Remember, Remember the 5th of November. 

Over the past few weeks I have been learning about a couple of holidays that are celebrated in this great country. The first one is called Guy Fawkes day. On the 5th of November in 1605, a catholic man was unhappy with the failure of the King James to grant more religious tolerance to the Catholics, because his mother was Catholic. Guy Fawkes plotted with four other men to blow up parliament. The plot went wrong when one of the men wrote to a cousin not to go to parliament and Guy Fawkes was caught by soldiers with the barrels of gun powder in a cellar under parliament. He had his head chopped off and put on Tower Bridge for all to see.
The following year, King James made the 5th of November a day of public thanksgiving, and it has been recognized since then.

If you look closely you can see the "Guy".

This holiday almost makes me laugh nowadays, because so many people participate in it, but when you think about what you are celebrating, it becomes a little morbid. I've learn the traditions that the teachers that I work with did as children and it make me chuckle. As children, the would make a "guy" out of newspaper, paper mache, and old clothes, and wheels him door to door saying "penny for the guy?" collecting money to then use on fireworks. Later, they would burn their effigies on the giant bonfire they made.

At biggest, it was 6 or more stories or so.

Nowadays, there are less effigies being burned on bonfires, but lots of random raging fires on the side of the road and firework literally EVERYWHERE! As we walked around Bradford last night, I realized that the fire department has got to HATE this holiday. When we walked to the grocery store we passed 3 huge, what I would call raging, out of control fires. At a closer look it was obvious that "Guy Fawkes Day" was actually a good excuse to burn your trash on the side of the street legally. For example we saw mattresses, old dressers, and pretty much random things that might just burn a bit. It suddenly made sense why we had been seeing piles of rubbish start accumulating over the past few weeks.

I went with June, (pronounced YOU-NA)

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This celebration and fireworks go on apparently all weekend, so last night we walked around Bradford and enjoyed the craziness going on there, and tonight we went to Bingley to enjoy a bonfire and lots of fireworks.  We really wanted to celebrate "right" so we had to find a bonfire that still burned an effigy because I just think that is messed up. I think that England was just in the need to have a holiday where people we allowed and expected to shoot off fireworks. We have the 4th of July, but if we didn't, I'm sure we would have made some other random event into a national holiday with fireworks.

fireworks followed, but still not as good as Peabody's 4th of July!

The fire only took about an hour to burn and die down to coals.

When I got home, fireworks were still going off in the neighborhood. This is taken from my front "lawn", which consists of rocks and a peace sign on weeds at the moment.