The Banger War

_{Photo by Dawid Zawiła}

If you read my blog yesterday then you probably know that my family isn't big on Christmas celebration. We don't do anything special for Christmas. As a matter of fact, it's like every other day to us. But one thing my dad does allow us to do is go have fun with friends. So we do visit some of our friends and play with them while shooting different kinds of firecrackers. Christmas is fun, there is no doubt about that and with the right friend group, you sure will look forward to it every December irrespective of if your family celebrates it or not.

If there's one thing I do love about Christmas though, it's the mood. There is this happy mood that always comes with Christmas. The mood is so noticeable that the moment you step out of your home, you could feel it that it is indeed Christmas. You see people dress in colorful clothes, you see how happy everyone automatically becomes, almost like they've all decided to forget about their problems for a day and just have fun. It's always beautiful to watch.

Another thing I love about Christmas is the carnivals. People always tend to travel back home (their villages) for Christmas to go meet with loved ones but those of us who stay behind don't regret it either. There are always carnivals and events that comes up every Christmas with really entertaining things, like dancers, musicians and performers coming on stage to give the crowd a really good thing.

But for me, the best part of Christmas for me happens to be something I haven't done in a while now, it's something I and my friends call the Banger War. What we do is that we try to save as much money as we can towards Christmas and when we have enough, we go buy as much firecrackers as our money could afford, then we wait for our rivals who live in the other street who always went through all of the same process. We meet at a mutual location and then the war begins.

This was something I did as a kid and whenever I think about Christmas, it always pops up on my mind. After meeting at the mutual location, we all bring out our firecracker and just start throwing it at each other. It was a very risky game and some people always ended up hurt but luckily it never something serious because we had a rule not to buy those big firecrackers that were capable of causing huge harm to us.

We would throw our firecracker against our opposition and at the end of the game, one team always ends up giving up either because we've overpowered them or because we had saved more money that the other guys and had gotten more firecrackers. It was a very risky fun game that we always kept away from our parents but now that I think about it, all I can say is that it was a really stupid thing to do and we were lucky no one got severely hurt.