I don't think you have this holiday in Australia. 4th Thursday of November. Here we stuff ourselves silly with roast turkey, cranberry sauce fresh from the can, various veggies, apple pie, pumpkin pie and a whole bunch of other yummy stuff. And we also watch football on TV. Eggnog and other alcohol.

The football and alcohol sounds familiar but we do it anytime, not just once a year.

Football and Alcohol? Sounds like a typical Aussie weekend! Add some Blueberry pie, and you'll have an awesome Thanksgiving..!

Chris

We don't observe the Thanksgiving holiday though as some have said, if there is some grog in the fridge then there is always a good excuse to consume it.

Australia Day (26th January), Queen's Birthday long weekend in June or September depending on what state you live in, and the Labour Day long weekend in October are our major holidays.

On the Queen's Birthday weekend as a kid we'd light a bonfire in the back yard (I think ours was in the backyard incinerator - remember when we all had those? and set off domestic fire crackers which the cotton wool bridage banned in the early 1980s - it was equally customary for boys to 'lift' a few crackers and convert them to bungers or copper bombs. Some boys would not take the required amount of care due to inexperience and the bunger would go off in their face. The unfortunate side of what was a great time to be alive I reckon.

On the Queen's Birthday weekend ...

When I was a kid cracker night used to be on Empire Day.

Banning the bunger saved a few letterboxes ... and frogs.

On the serious side, each year many kids did manage to maim themselves or their companions on the hands and face (including loss of eyes) by doing stupid things with skyrockets and twopenny bungers. If you tied a few twopennies together you had a pretty effective bomb.

Then there were the bunger guns made from water pipe that fired marbles and other missiles.

In my childhood the bungers came in four sizes. The threepenny bunger was so big it had only one practical use - blowing up a neighbour's letter box. It would have a pretty devastating effect on a Thanksgiving turkey.

The penny bunger came next, and was what you would use to fire a marble out of a 3/4inch pipe gun through a five-ply board. Third down were "squibs", about as thick as a ballpoint, which came in strings of about 20 for a shilling. You could let them off as a string, like the Chinese do, or you could separate them for experimental purposes such as how high could you make your sister jump. The smallest were Tom Thumbs, about 1/8th inc diameter and in strings of about fifty. Separated out, the thing to do was to hold the back end of one between your lips and light the fuse to demonstrate how mature you were. If things went well, your lips would only be numb for about a minute.

Not only did I live to tell the tale, I still have a couple of dozen Tom Thumbs in a tin box that lay unnoticed amongst toys that my mother kept sentimentally for about 40 years. I kept intending to put them to a good use, but now it is illegal.

Maven

A square sheet metal letterbox, after suffering from a threepenny bunger, became round.

This neighbour complained the year before when the kids in the street shot tin cans into the air from another closely fitting can buried in the ground. Usually they went straight up, but every now and again, one would fly off at an angle, disturbing those who had forgotten what it was like to be a kid.

A threepenny bunger was a major investment when pocket money was two shillings a week (24 pence) and an afternoon at the pictures including bus fares, entrance and an ice cream cone was two shillings.

Another application of such explosives was to place one in a toilet in your high school, burger joint or other such location. Water turns out to be a very good conductor of acoustic energy, resulting in the toilet getting broken...

I remember one that was called 'Thunder'. With a bit of experimentaion and perfect timing they could be dropped down the open stairwells at high school to explode in mid air right outside the science labs. Always gauranteed to brighten up a slow day.

Having two older brothers, I was always a guinea pig for whatever experiments they wanted to carry out. They assured me that Tom Thumbs were called that because you were supposed to hold them between your thumb a forefinger to let them off and it wouldn't hurt a bit. You should have seen them scarper when I let out a blood curdling scream. I thought my fingers had been blown off! I was only about 4 and Mum would've killed them if she knew. It was also their idea to throw Penny Bungers at Mum on Cracker Night because she liked the bang. No she didn't and damn near killed me whilst my two brothers rolled around in hysterics.

Remember throwdowns? I took some to school the year before they were banned from sale and not realising that the school had banned them anyway I let some of them off at playlunch near the feet of one of the teachers.

End result: I copped six of the best and the student who gave me away got a black eye for his troubles.

I didn't take any fireworks though - I always kept those for weekends.

I've got one night time boating flare left for this new years.
It's the only time I've been game to light them outside of emergency.