I'm not a big fan of fireworks. I blame my parents. I was conditioned to fear and dislike them at an early age.
Each year around the 4th of July, my Mom would always tell me and my brothers some scary story about a boy she knew who got his hand blown off by a cherry bomb when she was a kid in the 1960s. The story changed as a grew older. When I was five, the boy just lost a thumb. When I was eight, they boy had lost an entire hand. By the time I turned 10, I think the kid blew his head off.