Street Firecrackers Gone Wrong

I’ve always liked to go to Mexico for New Years, as a kid. It was a different feeling over there than when we stayed in Houston. My mom is from Monterrey, Nuevo Leon and every holiday season when we were kids, we went there for both Christmas and New Year.

The thing I loved about it was celebrating with all my cousins. I have a ton of first cousins, 19 to be exact. The older ones were the ones the lit up the holidays, literally. During Christmas and New Year, the streets of Mexico were covered with lingering smoke of fireworks or cohetes as they are called in Mexico. They are long firecrackers that you hold onto until they shoot up. My cousins would place them in a glass bottle, it would hold it until it was ready to take off.

My aunt lived in a house with a large porch. Whenever the cousins lit up cohetes, I hung under the porch because I thought it was safe there. They would go into the street and start lighting them up.

You could hear the happy screams of children in the neighborhood celebrating with cohetes all around. Kids running with sparklers (safer, in my opinion) and chasing each other with joy. I stayed under the safety of the porch and watched my cousins light up cohete after cohete.

As we huddle for warmth and watched the cohetes shoot up, I wrapped my sweater tighter around me. I mentally thanked my mom for making me wear my white tights, the air was extremely chilly and my legs were warmed in a nylon and cotton embrace. I had a velvet green skirt with a matching velvet vest (the 90s) and my white tights with black boots.

My smaller cousins asked me to help them light their sprinklers and as I did, Erick, the oldest, lit a huge cohete. I finished lighting their sprinklers and just then felt a shooting pain up my thigh, and then burning. I started shouting and my mom realized I was hit with a chunk of cohete up my skirt. I started yelling and flapping my hands feverishly on and under my skirt trying to get it out. My mom was able to stop the fire and grabbed the chunk of cohete.

It was as big as a quarter. I was taken inside and checked on. I’m sure it wasn’t a whole cohete, just a fragment of it that shot out the wrong way. I was sat on my aunt’s floral couch and my mom pulled my skirt up. My skin was lighty pink but not burned, the tights protected my skin. I was thankful but still a bit shocked with the fright of having a firecracker so close to me. My cousin was very apologetic but I reassured him that no harm was done and everything is okay.

I don’t remember the rest of the night but I do know that we wrapped up the cohetes that night.

The times changed, family changed, and we no longer go to Mexico for holidays. But I will always remember the night a firecracker almost got me. There have been many other times that has happened in my family, it happened to my mom once. But also, all around Mexico. Cohetes are just part of hiliday festivites, like chalk hearts for Valentine’s Day or Turkey for Thanksgiving, cohetes are a staple of December holidays. It can be very dangerous but even with all the accidents that have been reported, the streets are atill filled with laughter, lingering smoke, and ashes of cohetes.