TNT Sparklers! Sizzling Americana on a Stick.

I was sitting out on the back porch a couple of days past the Fourth of July and spotted a bundle of slender blue boxes. TNT Sparklers with a starburst of colors for an exclamation point sitting on a little bistro table. Someone had brought them to our festivities on that sunny Saturday, yet they'd never been used. Just the sight of the boxes, though, made me nostalgic. I'm pretty sure it was Aunt Kay who would bring a stash of sparklers to us kids every Fourth of July in the '70s. A few friends were already managing to get their hands on bars of firecrackers, M-80s and even a few bottle rockets. I'm not sure what the laws were regarding home fireworks at the time in Vermont but I remember thinking those firecrackers and M-80s must have come from some form of organized crime. It made me a little nervous that a couple boyhood friends always had them in the summer. One friend used them as a form of bribery with other kids in town. Strangely enough, he was the fire chief's son. I was pretty happy with just the sparklers, though. If we could wait until dark, much fun would be had, lighting them… hoping they would ignite… and then whirling them around at arms-length, skywriting out names from the visual chasers of the sputtering sparks. Along with the thrill, there'd be occasional injuries and screams of pain. If you held the sparkler's metal stick all the way to its burning end, sometimes the sparks would singe the backs of your hand and wrist. Worse yet was when, knowing we needed to collect all those spent sparklers we'd flung to the ground, grabbing one that was still hot. Ouch! Danger could also lurk far beyond the Fourth of July when days or weeks later barefoot fun and games happened to stumble across an errant spent sparkler, jamming it into the tip of a big toe. These TNT sparklers were made in Thailand and distributed by American Promotional Events in Florence, Alabama. Despite my Americana association with sparklers, they've been around in various forms long before America's Independence Day. According to How Are Sparklers Made: The Exciting Science And History Of Sparklers Slava Litvin at topGsmalibu.com. Check out the retail site. It's got cool stuff like mini sparklers in the shape of letters and numbers, old-school pick-up-stix, confetti, pea-shooters and lots more cool stuff! It is believed the first sparklers were not celebratory in nature at all. A Greek architect, Callinicos of Heliopolis invented them around 670 A.D. It was a hand-held fireworks weapon used to fend off arriving enemy ships. The cheirosiphon, also known as Greek Fire, could shoot flames toward the unwanted guests. The modern version of sparklers was first created around 1850 in Germany, called wunderkerzen, and basically were a wire dipped in gunpowder. What could go wrong with that? Around the turn of the 20th century, wunderkerzen were introduced to America at a large exposition and proved insanely popular with children. It makes one wonder how many little hands or heads of hair were scorched in the process, but eventually the composition of sparklers changed to somewhat more predictable yet still pyrotechnic-adjacent fun. Today's sparklers are a thin iron wire coated with a thick coat of flammable paste. The paste is made up of metal fuel which reacts with oxygen to create sparks, an oxidizer which releases molecules of oxygen to fuel the chemical reaction and a binder which holds the mixture together, similar to cement. The thin boxes of sparklers on my porch indicate each hold five sparklers and they're #8 Gold. Depending on types of metal used, different hues of sparks can be created… silver, gold and orange/red. Metal salts can be used to create other colors such as green. I'm going to save the sparklers 'til our next friend gathering or dinner party. I hope the humidity hasn't made them duds. I think it would be fitting to burn them one evening on the back porch with a little Dolly Parton playing in the background. A tribute to a sparkling all-American icon.