Northern Lights are even better than the world's best fireworks night

"Because we live so much of our lives in the dark, we're addicted to bright lights."

That's how the Reykjavic woman explained the mad abundance of bonfires and fireworks on New Year's Eve.  It's a national rebuttal of the weather.  A celebration of resilience and an assurance that they will make it through the darkness to the long, light-filled days of summer.  And it conspires to create what must be one of the best places in the world to celebrate a turn of the year.

Citizens start letting off fireworks from mid-afternoon.  When, of course, it's already grey and gloomy enough for the colours to show up in the sky.  The pace builds steadily as the hours tick by.  On the whole, these aren't official civic or community displays, but private arsenals.  Tradition has every family spending between £200 and £300 on fireworks for the evening.  The fireworks vendors are the charities that run the island's search and rescue organisations; critical infrastructure for this rugged and often dangerous land.  Thus people aren't just funding their display for fun; it's a civic duty.

And we're not talking the usual modest, back-garden stuff here.  These are proper sky-fillers that would

do any professional display proud.  Difference being that at a professional gig, you're looking at one point in the sky.  In Reykjavic, you're surrounded.  As we approached midnight, things built to a crescendo.  At any given second, perhaps 30 large fireworks were lighting up the sky from one horizon to another.  It was impossible to keep track of … better to watch one patch of sky and take in four or five displays.

The illuminations carry on at this pace for a full hour after midnight.  Frankly, you'll get tired of watching them before the citizens stop firing them.  We retreated to our room just after 1, and it sounded like artillery fire in a war zone until 4 or 5am.

You can appreciate the festivities from anywhere in Reykjavic, but we'd bought into a package with Discover the World.  (The same specialist agency that organised my trip in October 2013.)  A formal dinner kicked off with cocktails in our hotel, the Grand, at 6pm.  Then the first two courses of our dinner before getting bundled into buses to take in one of the community bonfires. (pictured at the top.)

In addition to the fireworks, most communities collect massive piles of wood to create towering pyres in the early evening.  This is no mean feat in a country with few trees.  We visited one of the larger ones in the Reykjavic suburbs; a bonfire the size of a generous mansion, flames licking three or four stories in the air, scores of buses bringing tourists in.  But we'd seen the wood stacked in every village we'd visited along the south coast.  It's all part of the quest for illumination.

Back to the Grand for dessert and some music in the ballroom before heading up to the fourth floor, where a balcony wrapped around three sides of the building to give a remarkable panorama.  Viewing fuelled by champagne and platters of dessert canapés, of course.  We could have danced 'til 4am back in the ballroom, but we figured nothing could top the fireworks so turned in.

Not all the fireworks in Iceland are man-made, of course. The main reason for coming here in the winter is the Northern Lights, though there's no guarantee you'll see them.  The skies need to be clear, you must be away from the ambient light of the city, then you need all sorts of other atmospheric conditions to fall into place.  Most country hotels have a wake-up list: they watch, and ring you if anything appears.

Miraculously, the clouds parted for just a few hours in our whole trip, and that happened at midnight when conditions were favourable.  The spectacle is one of the most bizarre things I've ever seen in nature.

At first glance, I could have mistaken our sighting for a long cloud illuminated by the moon.  It was a long, wide white smudge across the centre of the sky.  But then it began to move.  The lights dance, shimmer, shift and glow in eerie and unexpected ways.  They come and go in an instant.  At one point, there was just a the thin horizontal track above the horizon.  Moments later, there were three sets of lights all doing different things at different points.

Depending on the gases in the air, the lights can take on all sort of colours.  Ours were primarily white with flashes of green.  They were at their most dramatic when they seemed to drizzle down the sky, like   thin white icing sliding down a chocolate cake.  At the same time, the stars were shining with remarkable clarity.  We're so used to light pollution, we forget that without human intervention, the night sky is pinpricked by thousands of lights.  The only place I've gotten a view of the star-scape this good was on a cruise ship in the South Pacific.  Granted, it was a lot warmer.  But this is closer.

The fireworks were great, but it was this sighting of the Northern Lights that really made the trip.  What man creates is impressive.  What nature rolls out is truly awe inspiring.