Bonfires and toffee
Nov. 5th, 2006 07:18 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
ladyofastolatDoes anyone else have a tradition of eating black treacle toffee on November 5th, and calling it "Bonfire Toffee"? I was brought up with this, but haven't encountered anyone here "down south" that knows about this tradition, and it wasn't shared by any of my childhood friends in Gloucestershire. (Just to complicate matters, Pellinor remembers eating Bonfire toffee, but that was cinder toffee, not black treacle.) While my childhood Halloween traditions owe a lot to the Scottish half of my family, I think that the Bonfire night ones come from my mother, who's from Derbyshire. I've found lots of references to Bonfire toffee online, but nothing about what regions the tradition comes from, so I'd be interested to know if people used to eat it, or not, and whereabouts that was.
We never used to set off fireworks in our garden... though we did once get someone else's spent rocket fall into the garden so violently that it went about four inches into the grass. This has given me a lifelong nervousness around fireworks, since I worry what such a thing would do to my head. I prefer to watch them from inside, or else, as with the Cowes Week fireworks, to be safely on land while they get sent off from a barge out at sea. I was always scared of sparklers, too. I thought they'd burn down and eat my hand. To this day, I still hate matches, and can only light them if they're long matches, and even then only with much shying and squeaking.
Anyway... we used to have indoor fireworks, which were rather pathetic little things, really, but I liked them when I was about five. I remember "snake in the grass", where a strange snake-like thing pushed itself out of some green froth. I'd like to see a box of indoor fireworks again, just for old times' sake. I'd have to get Pellinor to light the match, though. Yes, I freely admit it: I am a wimp.
We never used to set off fireworks in our garden... though we did once get someone else's spent rocket fall into the garden so violently that it went about four inches into the grass. This has given me a lifelong nervousness around fireworks, since I worry what such a thing would do to my head. I prefer to watch them from inside, or else, as with the Cowes Week fireworks, to be safely on land while they get sent off from a barge out at sea. I was always scared of sparklers, too. I thought they'd burn down and eat my hand. To this day, I still hate matches, and can only light them if they're long matches, and even then only with much shying and squeaking.
Anyway... we used to have indoor fireworks, which were rather pathetic little things, really, but I liked them when I was about five. I remember "snake in the grass", where a strange snake-like thing pushed itself out of some green froth. I'd like to see a box of indoor fireworks again, just for old times' sake. I'd have to get Pellinor to light the match, though. Yes, I freely admit it: I am a wimp.
