The New Year's fireworks started early this year. Like two weeks early. While most people were still working on their Christmas shopping, some itchy fingers got to uncle's private pyrotechnic stash and sent up a few errant kabooms just to see if the stuff really worked. (It did.)

There have been laws passed; permits required; shipping containers inspected; sad tales of injury; stern warnings from police officers, firefighters, teachers, doctors and the mean lady up the street, but every year, barring the reprieve from a colossal rainstorm, O'ahu goes completely berserk with New Year's fireworks.

The years pass by like the whir of H.G. Wells' time machine, but the mad popping, blasting, burning, smoking and booming goes on untamed, unfazed, undaunted.

Why? Because on the "quieter" years, be it a rainy night, a new law or the low-key year after a big milestone year, we kind of miss the pandemonium and search around to bring it back again.

In the early 1960s, local government put a lid on do-it-yourself aerial fireworks. There were firecrackers aplenty, but not so much the fancy, sparkly ooh-invoking sky bursts.

In December 1966, The Advertiser ran an editorial in anticipation of the upcoming New Year celebration. The piece read, in part:

"Few places could match the 'old' Honolulu on New Year's Eve when thousands of rockets and other fireworks turned the sky into a Technicolor wonder. Anyone who can also recall the injury toll in the next day's paper would certainly not want to return to that past. But it seems to us that several things could be done to put the color of fireworks back into the New Year's Eve celebration, plus maintaining the safety record. The city itself might finance several displays staged by professional fireworks handlers. Better yet, civic groups or other clubs could band together to put on displays under coordination of city officials and police. There have been a number of fine 'private' displays of this in the past. ... The idea is to keep minimizing the danger of fireworks but to bring back some of the beauty to go with the noise of firecrackers, which we have preserved."

Turns out the paper ran the same editorial the year before. Dogged about those aerials!

Now we have the public shows, the private shows (which are pretty hard to keep private since they can be seen for miles) and the super-secret shows way up the valley provided by pyro uncle and his band of gunpowder-packing nephews (immortalized in Darrell H.Y. Lum's classic piece "Firecracker Uncle").

The "controlled" ones did not, do not, will never replace the "at-home" ones. That whole argument needs to be seen for the farce it is. Fireworks is a pro-am sport, and the "ams" are wiley, resourceful and itchy.

Lee Cataluna's column runs Tuesdays, Fridays and Sundays. Reach her at 535-8172 or lcataluna@honoluluadvertiser.com.

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