By Gagandeep Ghuman
Published: July 2, 2013
Every kid loves fireworks, but Kris Keyes loved the colour-lit sky a wee bit more.
“Some kid wants to grow up to be a scientist or a pilot, but I wanted to do fireworks,” Keyes says.
Keyes and his wife Whitney Keyes have helped put up the Canada Day fireworks show for the past seven years in Squamish, spending at times six hours to ensure we can turn down the knob of our worries and celeberate being Canadian.

Fireworks were Kris Keye’s first love.
At 13, Keyes accompanied his parents to the Merrit Music Festival, where the family worked a parking lot contract.
The big draw for the young Keyes was seeing the fireworks at the end of the festival.
It was hypnotizing to see the small stars zoom out of nowhere to wash the sky in multicolour hues.
It felt like magic, and Keyes wanted to be a part of it.
He prodded his father to talk to the people who ran the pyrotechnic show at the festival.
Kevin Siggs and Bill Butler, the owners of Midnight Pyro, the company that ran the show, were happy to show him around.
With their guidance, he mastered the art of fireworks, becoming at age 17 the youngest person in Canada to be an official pyrotechnic artist.
With fireworks in mind, he also did an electrical apprenticeship from BCIT.
“On my 18th birthday, I ran the entire fireworks show by myself. After that point, I did the shows everywhere,” he says proudly.
Still, his passion isn’t his profession.
He works in Whistler , but as Canada Day comes close, his mind turns to the shells and the colours he wants to see in the sky that year.
Whitney Keyes, a teacher at the Don Ross Secondary School, is his partner in life and in fireworks. He met her at the Merritt festival, and their very first date was filled with fireworks.
“I invited her to spend an evening with me, and promptly put her to work,” says Keyes, laughing.
Not that she complained.
“I thought it was very cool, it was something quite different,” she said.
As their relationship grew, so did her involvement with the fireworks.
Now married and a decade into their relationship, both work as a team to create the fireworks show in Squamish.
It can easily take up to six or eight hours to set up the display.
Most people see fireworks at a distance, but Kris and Whitney see them explode right above them.
“It can be scary sometimes, but it’s also very exciting to see them this close,” Whitney says.
“It’s like a birthday party.”
Together they have set up firework shows all over the province, but it was their fire work show during the Olympics in Squamish that they remember most fondly.
Although they do get paid, running a fireworks show is still not enough to sustain it as a fulltime job.
The biggest reward, however, is seeing people smile.
“I can’t see them, but I know that people are happy and smiling, that’s why I do it,” Keyes said.