7 Amazing Ways to Celebrate New Year’s Eve with Kids
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New Year’s Eve is always rife with color, pomp, and excitement. There is always a buzz in the air and incredible anticipation of what the next year will bring. It is always amazing to know you are about to start off a new year. The excitement across the world is palpable. At home, everyone is looking forward to having an amazing new year and they are eager to end the current one and usher a new year.
The kids are also caught in all of the excitement and they look forward to having a great New Year’s Eve. As a parent, it is your duty to deliver fun to them. One day these days will be gone and your little children will be adults, and you want them to have amazing memories of the beginning of each new year as a family. Here are some of the amazing ways you can celebrate New Year’s Eve with your kids.
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Have a pajama party
Not plans to go out on New Year’s Eve? This is definitely understandable. Depending on your home town, some places can get crazy that night. Sometimes, staying home is the most enjoyable way to bring in a brand new year. You can still have fun at home! Rock out New Year’s Eve pajama-style. Buy some matching pajamas for everyone in the family. Even if you have some older children that may roll their eyes at the idea, they may secretly enjoy it. If not, they may at least enjoy the gesture.
Designate one room as the venue for the party. Deck it out in New Year’s gear to bring life to the pajama party. Bring lots of drinks and snacks and party away.
Make New Year resolutions together
This can easily become a family tradition. This is a family tradition that would be meaningful and bring bonding between everyone. The point in this is not to assess whether anyone will keep the resolutions they make. Make it clear to your kids that this is not about accountability or anything of that sort.
There are a few different ways that you can do this. One way would be to have lots of fun with it! The point, in this case, would be to have fun guessing what resolutions the other person has set. Go round and let others guess what resolutions you have made and so on. You will also get your turn to do so. You can easily turn this into something hilarious. Whoever guesses correctly gets a small reward.
Another way you could do this is to spend some time reflecting on the past year as a family. What were the highs of the year? How could you improve the lows of the year? This is an excellent way to teach kids from a young age how to reflect on the past and work on improving the future by setting goals.
Play karaoke
Fire up the karaoke machine. If you don’t have one, there are so many on Amazon to choose from. Some even just have a microphone that does it! The one important thing in all of this is to put on all your kid’s favorite songs. You can have turns at the microphone. It will be the most fun when everyone participates. No shame- if you are a bad singer, it will only make your kids laugh more! This will be guaranteed to liven up your night.
A good way to make this extra special is to surprise them with the karaoke machine if you don’t already have one. Try to only bring it out on extremely special occassions such as New Year’s Eve.
Play family-friendly New Year’s games
There are many games you can play this night. My favorite is Find the clock game. You set an alarm for say, 4 minutes and then hide the clock. The kid will have to find the clock before the five minutes are over. Alternatively, you can set a number of alarm clocks to ring at once and the kid has to find them and switch them off all before they stop ringing.
This will not only be fun and silly, but this will get that energy out!
Join other families in the celebration
New Year’s Eve is a very sociable night, no matter if you spend it with just family or if you include friends also. If you are comfortable joining other families to welcome the New Year, it would be a great occasion for your kid. Let them socialize and have fun with other kids. Seeing kids get hyped up about the new year together is guaranteed for a great night, even if they are completely exhausted after.
Have a feast
What is a decent holiday without a feast? Bring the kids in and let them help you out in preparing a feast for the New Year’s Eve. Prepare their favorite meals and have a blast.
A great thing about this is that you can teach your kids how to make their own meals. Also, the more food the better, so if your kids each like a different meal, that’s okay for tonight. There doesn’t have to be fights over food. Make it all! A bonus to this is you usually have some great leftovers for the next few days.
Create a family tradition
There are so many families that spend a lot of time usually creating traditions during the Christmas holidays. A lot of efforts are spent on Christmas traditions. However, some kids get a bit of an after-Christmas letdown. There is so much hype about Christmas that it can be a bit disappointing once it is all over. If you create specific family traditions for New Year’s Eve, it will keep that momentum going.
One of my favorite family traditions is going around the table to say what we are grateful for the year that is about to come to an end. Then we say what we hope to achieve for the coming year. This is a great way to teach kids how to be grateful while still having some fun. It also helps them to get even more excited about the new year. This is also an incredible tool to teach them the values of establishing and maintaining goals.
Once New Year’s is over, make sure you start planning Valentine’s Day for your kids!
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