Our normal agenda for New Year's Eve and New Year's Day is simply to travel north to spend the holiday with my husband's family. That pretty much relieves me of the burden of any holiday planning, and we simply have a fun time with family.
This year, however, we elected to stay home. Not only do we have a newborn, but our growing family is getting harder and harder to stuff into our in-laws' single-wide mobile home. (When we visit, we have a total of eight people, one dog, and one African grey. It's a bit cramped!)
Of course, the one year we stay home, what do we miss?
SNOW!
My goodness. We were so disappointed! We almost never get to see snow (we've seen it once, to be specific), and there it was - just sitting there, mocking us. In fact, my husband's parents got more snow than they've ever had during their entire residence in northern Arizona.
But anyhow - I digress.
The entire point was that I found myself at a loss for things to do on New Year's Eve and New Year's Day. In other words, we need some family traditions.
We ended up not doing a lot for New Year's Eve, and doing absolutely nothing on New Year's Day. While it wasn't awful, it wasn't a brilliant success either. Thus, I gave myself the assignment for this month to find some New Year's Eve/Day "traditions" that we can try on for size next year, the ultimate goal being to find some long-term traditions that will work for our family.
Here's our plan for next year!
New Year's Eve
Special dinner: Corndogs and French fries
Dessert: Crockpot Brownies in a Mug with whipped cream
Fireworks & a Bonfire (whenever we buy a fire pit, that is!)
(For cold weather, possibly a movie instead?)
(For cold weather, possibly a movie instead?)
Toasting the New Year with Martinelli's apple cider
Watching the ball drop
New Year's Day
Special breakfast
One thing that we have found absolutely does not work for our family is letting the littles stay up late. That is a recipe for disaster. Perhaps when we have older children, we'll let them stay up later (although my husband and I don't stay up till midnight ourselves).
Readers, do you have any New Year's traditions that are precious to you? I'd love to hear about them!
* Stealing both ideas (plus some others) from Wendy at Contentment Acres! Done without permission, but I don't think she'll mind!
We do a few things at home for NYE. We set up a home photo booth and get pictures. Then we play simple games. This year we had a bit of a marshmallow theme for most of the games so we:
ReplyDelete1. Built bridges out of mini marshmallows and toothpicks. These were suspended between two stacks of books and loaded with mini chocolates until they couldn't hold any more.
2. Marshmallow spoon race (put it on your spoon, walk to a partner, tip it into their spoon, and off they go. Spoons held in a mouth)
3. Blow mini marshmallows across the floor in a race.
You get the idea....
We also had glow sticks (Bought on clearance at Halloween) so the kids did a glow dance party and threw glow sticks at a target on the floor (made with painter's tape). We finish the evening watching a movie until midnight. The youngest three (Caleb age 4, Mason age 2, Samuel age 1) made it until 11:30pm before falling asleep. Everyone else made it to midnight. Simple but fun.
We do "midnight" at 9:00 because then we can watch the ball drop and fireworks on TV. We basically turn the TV on at 8:58, watch the ball drop and turn it back off so we miss all the filth "entertainment." One year when we didn't have TV, I just pulled a previous year's ball drop off youtube, though I know you'd have a harder time fooling Caleb with that one. We toast with Martinelli's, we count down, we give each other and Matthew a kiss and then he's in bed by 9:15. We do our own fireworks outside earlier in the evening as soon as it gets dark. We watch the Rose Parade on New Year's Day (a hazard of growing up in Southern California).
ReplyDeleteTristan and Jen - Thank you for those ideas! I am keeping them in mind for next year!!! :)
ReplyDeleteP.S. Jen - We turn the TV (computer) on at 8:58 too! :)