So the last week our town of San Felipe has been having one of its bigger celebrations. The highlight of this week is the night with fireworks. Every Mexican celebration has explosions (e.g. firecrackers, pop-bottle rockets, flash-bang mortars) but these are fireworks that are colorful.
Besides the carnival in the town square (with rides for kids and games such as "toss the ring on the bottle"), there are bands on the bandstand with couples dancing in the streets, and food & drink stands. But mainly it's everybody getting together in the town square watching people and talking with friends and neighbors...and a heavy dose of passing around mezcal bottles....though not as much as during the winter celebrations it seemed.
We joined our neighbors in the square a bit after 7:30 pm and passed the time playing, eating, drinking and talking. We were hoping they'd start the fireworks around midnight and we'd be home by 1am. We ended up getting home around 4am.
Here are some videos from different celebrations years ago to give you an idea of what we watched once the fireworks started.
Around 1am they started the "dancing with the bulls and angels." The crowd gathers around and people take turns putting these handmade contraptions on their heads. The sparks fly everywhere, sometimes burning items shoot off into the crowd (as we are all gathered right around the "performance area"), and all the bulls and angels include whistles and explosions in addition to the colored sparkles. In this video the crowd is nowhere as pressed in as last night. In addition, there was usually at least two figurines dancing while zero to six helpers danced with and taunted the "bulls" (as you'll see some do in this video). The bull & angel dancing went on here last night way too long. Maybe 50-60 of these as we waited for the grand finale: El Castillo
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=flmQBL6pliQ
This next video really doesn't do justice to seeing a castillo going off. It starts with more "bull dancing" and the castillo fires up at around 1:58min. The whole thing is on a tower maybe thirty to forty feet high with the crowd gathered around its base as close as they dare with all the falling sparks. For us that means they are maybe six to ten feet from it. Kids on their parents' shoulders, babies sleeping against their mother's bosom, town drunks sleeping against a lamp-post base all right up in the mix of it all. As always in Mexico, there is zero concern for personal safety...life is short and God will decide if yours should be shorter (or completed sans eye or limb).
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=D2QpL7iEh5E
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