New Year’s Eve for families can be a hoot. There are tons of fun ideas to make the night enjoyable and memorable for you and your teens.
New Year’s Eve becomes more fun as our kids get older. We love to spend the evening together eating, playing games, celebrating, and reminiscing. My husband and I know in a few years our kids will be off to parties (hopefully hosted by us) and traditions might go flying out the door, but for now, they like to hang with us.
Here are some of the fun things we do as a family and a few ideas you might want to integrate into your own New Year’s Eve tradition now that you’ve got kids who can think and dream for themselves.
Remember & dream
Each year since the kids have been in school we’ve printed out fun memory and dream sheets then spent time during the evening remembering the past year while writing down our dreams and goals for the upcoming one. We like to review the sheets from the year before, which I keep in my Christmas notebook, and then we fill out new ones.
This year I created our own remember and dream sheets so you can join in the fun too. Just click to download your own printable sheets.
Download HERE
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Games to make the laughter flow
Games should always be a part of New Year’s Eve for families. Whether it’s board games that were received for Christmas or old favorites like Scrabble or Risk. Pull out some games and even puzzles and get the whole family laughing and strategizing.
If you are staying up to watch the ball drop, how about a rousing game of bingo? You can play as you watch TV or hold a movie marathon. Here’s a link to my favorite pre-made bingo cards: {courtesy of Thirty Handmade Days}
Do you have an artist in your family? Have them make their own cards. Here’s a link to some blank ones: {courtesy of tothesquareinch}
Food everyone loves
What’s New Year’s Eve without food?
My husband grew up eating a particular meal on Christmas Eve with his family. We continued that tradition until we moved away from our hometown a few years ago. In our new town, the kids decided they wanted to eat that meal on New Year’s Eve. So, we do.
Our traditional New Year’s Eve fare is rice pudding (a Norwegian tradition), Swedish meatballs in sweet and sour sauce, fruit salad, and cookies.
We’ve taken all this fare and put our own special twist on it. We still eat the rice pudding (see below) but now we eat Italian meatballs with pizza sauce for dipping, Asian chicken cranberry salad, and ice cream pie (see below).
Serve Rice Pudding with milk and cinnamon/sugar. Delicious!
It doesn’t get much simpler than this. Pie shell, ice cream, voila!
These are just a few of our traditions. Each year we try new things out too. Last year we made hats out of paper and string. This year, who knows what we’ll find to try.
What are your family’s New Year’s Eve traditions? Do share.
Photo by Pineapple Supply Co. on Unsplash
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