Bonfire Night Planner

Bonfire Night, also called Guy Fawkes Night, falls on 5 November every year, marking the foiling of the 1605 Gunpowder Plot. This planner does three things. It runs through a 9-point safety checklist for fireworks, calculates food and drink quantities for any number of guests (default is set to 20, the average garden party size), and gives you a separate sparkler safety guide for kids, because sparklers cause more A&E injuries on Bonfire Night than the fireworks themselves.

If you are hosting at home, the food list scales automatically: roughly 1 hot dog per adult, 0.5 toffee apples per person (kids tend to eat them, adults tend to look at them), 100g of marshmallows per head and a cup of hot chocolate each. The numbers are tuned to a typical 2 to 3 hour outdoor evening party. If you are heading to a public display instead, skip the food calculator and lean on the safety checklist for sparklers and warm-clothing prompts.

Sparklers reach about 1,000C at the tip, hotter than a kitchen blowtorch, and stay dangerously hot for at least a minute after they go out. The single most important rule: sparklers are not legally sold to anyone under 16, and the BSI guidance is that no child under 5 should ever be given one. Children aged 5 to 12 should be supervised one-to-one, wearing gloves, holding the sparkler at arm's length away from clothing.

The bucket of water at the end matters more than people realise. Spent sparkler tips in a wheelie bin or grass have caused secondary fires every year. Fill a metal bucket with cold water before lighting the first one, drop each finished sparkler in tip-down, and leave them there overnight. If a child drops a lit sparkler, do not let them pick it up, even after it stops sparkling. Foot it out, hose it down, then bin it once cool. The garden looks tidier on the 6th if you set the bucket up before the kids arrive.

Garden fireworks have got pricier and trickier. Selling fireworks to the public is restricted to four windows a year (15 October to 10 November is the main one), and category F2 fireworks (the home-display ones) need a 8 to 25 metre safety zone depending on the firework, which most British gardens do not have. Many councils now actively discourage home displays, and your home insurance will rarely cover fireworks-caused damage. Most families end up doing a small sparkler-and-food evening at home and walking to the local display for the actual fireworks.

Whichever you choose, the food maths is the same. The shopping list this tool generates assumes a Bonfire Night sweet spot of warming, easy-to-eat food: jacket potatoes, hot dogs, beef stew, marshmallows, hot chocolate. If you also want to plan the traditional toffee apples or parkin properly, pair this with the [Recipe Scaler](/recipe-scaler) to scale a favourite recipe up to your guest count without doing the maths yourself.