twist and shout

Set the fireworks screaming off into the sky and bellow in admiration when they explode. This is a crucial part of the annual festivities. Watch the grown men in your company regress decades in age. When a particularly enormous bomb flowers directly overhead their voices drop in awe, and they whisper Nú, hver er með svooooona? wondering who among their neighbors had dared to light the fuse of such a monster. Watch the women, even the young ones, feign slight boredom with the spectacle, clucking with affectionate condecension at the boyish antics of their mates, brothers, fathers and sons, obediently performing the established practical, mature, and motherly role that passes for the feminine in these parts. Watch the one poor fellow find that he has nowhere to take the conversation after the foreign guest answers that yes, in fact twice before she has seen New Year's Eve in Reykjavík. (That question is also a traditional part of the annual festivities.)

Note that the name of the box of rockets fired from this roof is Snorri Sturluson: historian, poet, kisser-up to kings, failed politician of the thirteenth century. A literary giant. His first name meant something like 'trouble-maker,' as did that of his father, Sturla, 'stirrer.' In firework form, Snorri Sturluson is forty or fifty twisting squiggles of silver sparks that whistle and scream off over the nearby rooftops.