New Year’s Eve can be challenging for families with young children. Going out to see fireworks is cold and crowded, it’s hard to find babysitters, and bringing small children to a party and keeping them up until midnight is a recipe for a meltdown.
It’s often easier to celebrate at home, and with a little advanced planning, New Year’s Eve at home can feel as festive as a night out on the town.
Here are some fun suggestions for celebrating New Year’s Eve at home with family and friends of all ages. Both adults and kids will have a great time!
- Call the celebration a “slumber party” and require everyone to wear pajamas. Have plenty of blankets and sleeping bags lying around for the little ones to crawl into when they get tired, leaving the older kids and the adults to continue the revelry.
- As a project during the course of the evening, create New Year’s hats out of old cereal boxes and leftover holiday wrapping paper and ribbons (plus a few extra craft items, for fun). Keep some noisemakers on hand to complement the hats!
- Another fun project that all ages will love: make fridge magnets with your New Year’s resolutions on them (particularly good for resolutions involving food). Your local craft store will have all sorts of supplies for this.
- Ask guests to bring personal items to make time capsules. You can save holiday cookie and chocolate boxes to use as the capsule containers (perhaps covered with pretty wrapping paper or other decorations). Guests can take the capsules home, or you can save the capsules and invite your guests back to open them next year.
- Small children can practice their numbers by decorating cookies with the digits 2-0-1-1.
- For older children, practice counting by giving each guest a glass with a number on it. During the evening, the numbers will keep guests from mixing up glasses (reducing waste/washing up). Just before midnight, guests can start the countdown by toasting with their glasses in descending order.
- Celebrate the high point of the evening with a homemade balloon drop. Here’s how:
o Line up two rectangular paper tablecloths and punch holes every 2 or 3 inches down one long side of each.
o Stitch the two tablecloths together with yarn, leaving a couple of feet at one end for a rip cord.
o Tape the cloth to the ceiling on three sides, leaving one side open so that you can add the balloons. Let the center of the tablecloth hang down to leave space for the balloons.
o Inflate at least 75 balloons. Put them into the tablecloth, and then put paper streamers and confetti on top of the balloons. Tape up the last side of the cloth.
o At midnight, pull the rip cord, and stomp on the balloons!
o (Two tips: be sure to put the confetti and streamers on top of the balloons, not under them, or all the confetti will bunch up in the middle of the tablecloths and will fall out before midnight. Also, be sure to get metallic confetti – if someone spills a drink and paper confetti gets wet, it will leave little colored dots all over everything.)
(Thanks to Disney Family Fun, Culturemob.com, and Mother Nature Network for some of these great ideas.)
Whatever you do this New Year’s Eve, please don’t drink and drive!