Fireworks For Sale in Darwen

The second firework night of the year is the thirty-first of December, and almost nobody buys for it the way they buy for the fifth of November. It is a different evening and it wants a different order.

Four things that are not the same

It happens at midnight, not at seven. That is three hours of dark before anybody lights anything, and it is why a New Year order is usually shorter and bigger rather than longer and varied. Nobody wants a twenty-minute programme at five past twelve.

It is colder. Midnight on the thirty-first is about the coldest hour anybody willingly stands outside in, and that changes what people will sit through. A long programme that works on a mild evening in November will have emptied a garden by ten past twelve. Short is not a compromise here; it is the point.

The street is doing it too. On the fifth a display is an event; at midnight it is one of several going off at once within earshot. The pieces that stand out are the ones that go highest rather than the ones that last longest, which is the opposite of the advice that works in November.

Everybody is awake. The thing that makes the fifth of November difficult — neighbours, small children, animals, people who did not ask for it — is less of a problem at midnight on the thirty-first, when the whole street is up and expecting it.

Ordering for the thirty-first

The timing is easier than November’s. The rush is the fortnight before Bonfire Night, not the fortnight before New Year, so an order placed in the middle of December behaves normally: five to seven days for delivery, next day for collection.

What does catch people is assuming the hours. They change through the season and they are in the panel on this page, so a thirty-first that falls awkwardly — or one where the last useful day before it does — is worth checking against those rather than against last year.

Buying once for both

Plenty of people buy for the fifth and the thirty-first in one go, in October, and it is usually the better plan: the choice is at its widest then, and it is the fortnight-before-Bonfire-Night rush that it avoids. The only thing worth keeping separate is the decision about what actually goes up at midnight, because that is the one the four points above should change.