Have a family celebration on New Year’s Eve and ring in the New Year together

New Year’s Eve is a great time for a family celebration ? time to say goodbye to the old year and ring in the new. There are many group activities you can do to make your New Year’s celebration memorable, and create new traditions to share in coming years. Decorate for a festive atmosphere, eat some fantastic food, and take time to reminisce, and your New Year’s Eve tradition can’t help but catch on.

Decorations

What’s a party without sparkly decorations? You don’t need to spend a lot of money. Purchase some discount party supplies like balloons, streamers, and party hats. You can make a relatively inexpensive table centerpiece with some champagne glasses filled with colorful candy and curling ribbon in bright colors. If your house is still decorated for the Christmas holiday, you won’t have to do a lot to create a party atmosphere.

Food

After Christmas and Thanksgiving, you’re probably not going to want to fix another huge spread. Think party food: appetizers, pizza, veggie trays, cold cuts, sandwich fixings, finger foods, cookies, and brownies. Have lots of bubbly drinks like soda or sparkling cider for the kiddies, and some champagne for the grown-ups to toast the New Year at midnight.

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Activities

Your New Year’s celebration is the perfect time to reminisce. Create a DVD slideshow of pictures from the past year, set to the music you’ve enjoyed. My husband does this for us every year, and we love to sit in the living room, snacks and goodies in front of us, and watch the pictures and memories of our year. We pause the show, and laugh about the fun we had.

Another way to commemorate the pictures of the passing year is to have everyone create a scrapbook page. Bring out all the photos of the year, and have each person pick their favorites. Then use scrapbooking supplies like stickers, labels, paper cutouts, and ribbon to make a beautiful page (or two or three) that showcases your favorite ones. When you’re finished, compile the pages in a scrapbook and label it with the passing year. This will give you something to bring out on future New Year’s celebrations, when everyone is in the mood to reminisce.

New Year’s is also a perfect time for setting goals. Take some time to talk about any goals or resolutions you made the previous year, and how you did in sticking to them. Then make some resolutions for the New Year, and promise to help each other as they work toward their goals.

Talk about what will be happening in the upcoming year. Are you expecting a new baby? Is someone getting married? Are you moving into a new home, or planning a family vacation? This can be a great opportunity to do some informal planning and brainstorming about the events you are all looking forward to.

After you’re done with the reminiscing and talking, pull out some favorite board games. My family loves to play games on New Year’s Eve. Some of our favorites are Cranium, Mad Gab, Trivial Pursuit, and Scattergories.

When it gets close to midnight, turn the TV on and watch the ball drop in Times Square. Or, if you live in a place where it’s not too frigid in January, go outside and set off some fireworks of your own to ring in the New Year. Most of all, make your celebration a relaxed, informal time to celebrate and be together ? and everyone will look forward to doing it again.