Happy New Year!

There are many things we love about living in Germany, but this time of year we especially enjoy celebrating New Year's  the way the Germans do - with fireworks!  Our first year here we bought what we thought were a lot of fireworks only to be outdone by everyone else in town.  Every year since then we've invited friends over and everyone has brought some fireworks to add to the pile.  Last year (in 2011) the party got so big that we had to hold it at two houses with some families at our house and some families at another house nearby.  This year we rented the Burgerhalle here in town - a big space with a gym, kitchen, and large foyer area - so we could invite even more people to the festivities.

We ended up with fifteen or sixteen families and that many people made for lots of food, fun, and fireworks.

We pulled the ping pong table out of storage and set it up for the evening.  Emily and Jared spent some time testing it out before our guests arrived.

You know it's a very Mormon party when you have a parking lot full of minivans and SUVs

This is about half of the fireworks we ended up lighting off.  There were tons of bottle rockets and, Jared's favorite, batteries.  The batteries are great because by lighting one fuse you gets 50+ shots.  Around ten thirty we took all the kids outside and let them have some fun with the smaller things like sparklers and firecrackers.

Emily, Madison, and the other teenagers loved the roman candles.  They lived out their Harry Potter fantasies of sending up sparks in the Forbidden Forest.

Madison, Emily, and Emma had fun with these humongous sparklers which burned for five minutes.

Natalie had so much fun - she spent the night alternating between eating cookies or candy and playing with her friend Owen.  We barely saw her because she was so busy running around and playing. It was kind of nice once the big fireworks started because she was stationary!

Samantha also had a great time.  I was really grateful that each of our girls had at least one friend there to spend the evening with.  Sam loved the fireworks, the hula hoops in the gym, and the time she had to be with her friends.

Here's Abigail and her friend, Ashlyn.  Like Natalie, I didn't see Abigail much all night but I know she had a great time.  I think she would have had even more fun if I'd given her a lighter and a pile of fireworks to light off, but we do try to be responsible sometimes!

And here's the big kids - from L to R - Emma, Eli, Anthony, Emily, and Madison.  We set aside the balcony that overlooked the gym as the teenager space and they spent a lot of time up there playing board games, listening to music, and defending their territory against invading ten and eleven-year-olds.

About twenty minutes until midnight everyone moved outside for the big show.  With so many families contributing to our fireworks arsenal this year, we had a pretty amazing show.  The guys lined up buckets and bottles and filled them up with bottle rockets and then went down the line lighting them off one after the other.  They also set up all the batteries ahead of time so they were ready to be set off in quick succession. It was really impressive.  When I went to return the key for the Hall to the Mayor the next day, she told me that she had heard we had lots of fireworks and that everyone in town had enjoyed seeing them.   

Because our town is on a hill top we could see fireworks in the sky above all the villages around us.  It was pretty spectacular seeing all those fireworks and hearing the church bells ringing for twenty solid minutes.  I'll finish up with a quick video clip of the fireworks and wish you all the best in 2013!