This New Year’s Eve chrysanthemums, brocade crowns, weeping willows and maybe even some dancing monkeys will light up the night sky at one minute to midnight. 

Volunteers have been working hard all week over at Public Works to get the annual fireworks show set up.  There are hundreds of shells and mortars involved and they all have to be perfectly wired to fire at the right moment. 

That said, it’s a pretty simple set-up: thick tubes ranging from 3 to 12 inches in diameter mounted in wooden racks and stacked on a giant flatbed.  Inside each of the tubes is a brown-paper wrapped ball that when triggered will shoot into the sky and explode. 

Larry Mattingly is vice-president of the Seattle-based company Entertainment Fireworks.  He designed the Unalaska show and is charge of making sure it goes smoothly. 

“I arrange every single shell in the firing order.  And sometimes I fire two at time, sometimes three or four at a time.  In the finale, almost a hundred shells in the finale in about six or seven seconds.”

While many pyrotechnicians these days use computer programs to time the display, Mattingly is doing Unalaska’s show manually.  So every tube is wired into a board called a cue and those cues in turn are wired into the main firing board.  Then:

“The person that’s pushing the buttons sits there are the board and then I watch the show and I’ve got my hand on his shoulder.  And every time I tap him, he fires the next cue.”

Mattingly says doing it that way keeps the pace even.

“And then as the show goes on, we get a little bigger and a little better and a little faster.”

Although actually getting to trigger the fireworks is arguably the most fun job, Mattingly says the downside is that you don’t get to watch the show.

“He might be able to look up once in a while, but he’s gotta pay attention to that firing board, because when I tap him, he’s got to instantly fire another shell, because we don’t want any black sky.”

Jamie Sunderland has helped set up the fireworks for years.  He says they normally rotate through the group of volunteers, giving the newbies first dibs.  But they haven’t picked who gets to fire them off this year yet.

Mattingly says regardless, it should be beautiful, if everything goes as planned.

“Particularly if it’s really calm, then they can see the reflection of the fireworks at the same time they see the stuff breaking in the sky."

And he says no one will be bored by a lack of variety.

“In this show you’ve got one of every single shell we’ve got, in 350 different varieties.”

Which of course, you're welcome to name yourself.