A firecracker, as lit on Chinese New Year, New Year's Eve, or Independence Day. Depicted as a red tube with a burning fuse, sometimes lined with gold rings at its top and base.
Often used with ? Fireworks and ? Sparkler for various celebrations and holidays. Also applied to figurative senses of fire, e.g., slang hot, on fire (“excellent”).
While it may resemble a stick of dynamite on some platforms, several vendor designs, such as Google and Twitter's, suggest the emoji is modeled after traditional Chinese firecrackers, as are strung together and lit on such occasions as Chinese New Year.
Firecracker was approved as part of Unicode 11.0 in 2018 and added to Emoji 11.0 in 2018.
U+1F9E8
? Firecracker