Guy Fawkes Day

"Remember, remember the fifth of November,
Gunpowder, Treason and Plot.
I see no reason why gunpowder treason,
Should ever be forgot."

Five hundred years ago Guy Fawkes tried to blow up the house of parliament and every year since the British celebrate the event with fireworks and bonfires where they burn Guy Fawkes in effigy. Grace and I were in attendence.

We were pretty excited because it was the first non-American holiday we had ever celebrated, and we had real British friends to show us how to celebrate the event properly. It's not complicated really. You show up and watch the fireworks and then the bonfire. Since it's winter, everything is over by 8 o'clock. There was a carnival in town as well, but we went to eat.

The fireworks were really good though. I thought we were really close and a lot of the time you had to really crane your neck back to see everything. There wasn't really a grand finale though - the whole thing was spectacular, but then it was over. Someone was on a PA system the whole night, counting down till the fireworks in a calm and cool voice. When the fireworks finished he just said, "Well, how about that folks? Let's hear it for that display."

And then they lit off the bonfire. Sadly, effigies were nowhere to be seen. Apparently that part of the tradition is falling away. The bonfire was this enormous stack of wood palates. They were probably stacked fifteen feet high and once the fire really got going the flames leapt thirty or forty feet into the air. Everyone was kept quite a way back by two fences, but you could still feel the heat off the thing. It burned fast and furious, reducing the palate to a third of it's size in ten minutes. I had never seen a fire on that scale. It's quite a thing to see.

I had hoped Guy Fawkes day would be an event where the British people would revert to their ancestral origins, whooping and hollering around a fire without clothes on. That's not the case.

I put up 12 pictures of the whole thing on our flickr website. They're under the Cambridge photoset.