Family New Year's Ideas

New Year's Eve has rarely been a significant holiday for me, either as a child or an adult. Mostly because I am not AT ALL a night person, so the idea of staying up late waiting for midnight is not in the least bit appealing! Up until this year, I didn't do anything that interesting to celebrate with my daughters either, but this year we all had an absolute blast on New Year's and we've all agreed we want this to be an annual tradition, so today I want to share what we did for other families who may be looking for something fun to try next year!

1. NYE around the world

The main thing we did all day on New Year's Eve day was watch countries in each timezone celebrate their midnight every hour. I found a few live videos on YouTube that were showing live coverage throughout the day of celebrations around the world, so we were able to easily tune in each hour and see who was up next. We have a giant world map rug in our basement playroom, so we looked at the map and talked about how the time zones work and looked at what order different familiar countries would be celebrating. We only watched for 3-5 minutes each hour most of the time, but it was fun to pause every hour and see everyone celebrating, and the girls loved comparing their favorite firework displays and hearing different languages.

This one was only fun because my daughters were old enough to understand what was happening- they are seven years old and they were the perfect age for this. I wouldn't recommend this one for any children younger than that.

2. Looking at the calendar

Over dinner we got out the outgoing year's calendar and looked through each month, remembering events and birthdays and vacations we had had over the past year. My daughters draw a picture each month to put on the calendar too, so it was fun to look back on those- here's a blog post showing how we make our own family calendar each year by hand. It's almost like having a scrapbook minus the photographs!

3. Fondue

I had never made fondue before this night- somehow it seemed intimidating- but it was a fun and easy meal to put together with minimal cooking, and we all loved it! We had cheese fondue (I used this recipe) for dinner with mini hot dogs, carrots, sugar snap peas, broccoli, apples, ham, and bread. For dessert we had chocolate fondue, of course, with bread, leftover Christmas sugar cookies, apples, strawberries, and bananas. We also picked out some cranberry apple sparkling cider, which made the whole affair feel extra fancy.

4. Keep it lazy

The best part of our day? Staying at home in our pajamas all day relaxing, then going to bed at our normal time feeling like we weren't missing a thing since we already saw midnight come many times over! Especially with the girls still being young, and with school starting back on January 2nd for us, it's still not worth staying up late just to say we did it.

What are your favorite family New Year's traditions? Do you do much to celebrate? I'd love to hear your favorite ideas- I know it's too late for this year but it's fun to think ahead to next year and share while I still remember :) Happy New Year!

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