Icelanders take New Year’s fireworks to dizzying heights

The country's law provides a brief window, from December 28 to January 6, when buying and shooting off fireworks is allowed

Reykjavik: While New Year’s Eve fireworks are hardly rare, Icelanders take the tradition to breathtaking heights, firing the dazzling incendiary devices from back gardens, streets, hilltops or city parks across their Nordic island.

Iceland’s law provides a brief window, from December 28 to January 6, when buying and shooting off fireworks is allowed, and citizens buy more pyrotechnics in a week than most Europeans do all year — all in the name of charity.

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Each year the nation’s 365,000 inhabitants buy around 600 tonnes of fireworks, more than a kilo and a half (three and a half pounds) per person, according to Statistics Iceland. That’s more than six times the EU average in a full year, according to Eurostat, and only the Dutch come close to competing with Icelanders’ love for noisy bursts of colour in the wintry night sky.

The bulk of the devices go up on New Year’s Eve, turning the sky above the subarctic island into a glittering canopy from the capital Reykjavik to the smallest village. “We sort of burn away the past year and make way for the new one, which I think we’ll be very happy to do this year,” said Dagrun Osk Jonsdottir, a doctoral student and expert on Icelandic folklore.

The tradition, dating to the early 20th century, is rooted in the Nordic bonfire, a much older custom that is banned this year anyway because of the pandemic.

Once too expensive for most Icelanders, fireworks became more accessible to the general public thanks to a fund-raising campaign launched in 1968 by the volunteer Icelandic Association for Search and Rescue (ICE-SAR). The group, which controls most of the fireworks trade, has relied on the annual sales to finance its activities for the rest of the year ever since.