Family New Year’s Eve Celebration

(This ended up being a longer-than-expected post. Hopefully, this will give you some ideas for your own Family New Year’s Eve Party! The first portion is from my Instagram post.)

🎄 The hustle and bustle of the holidays are a bit full and sometimes overwhelming so for the past few years, we have been closing out the year with just the four of us. It is a silly time of celebration, but also a thoughtful time of reflection. No big bash for the Moys…lots of Thanksgiving and Christmas bashes already.

🎉 We take turns planning the evening and it usually involves an hourly activity until we count down to whatever midnight hour we can make it to. This year was a bit different than past years and that is okay. I planned it this year, but with NYE being on Sunday when we have our family dinners at my parents’ house with the sibs and family, I was thinking of something different…but then someone goes and has a baby right before Christmas and someone goes and gets sick…we decided to keep that simple and move up our own shindig, which meant we didn’t quite do what I was planning.

🎊 We did half-hourly activities, from enjoying an appetizer dinner to photo prop goofiness, from reviewing the year to dreaming of what 2018 could hold, and a new one for our party this year was games. We love board games and play often but this was an NYE first. It was funny to see we each picked the game that was somewhat of our “specialty.” You can see in the games pic what we chose.

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Half-Hour #1

We had an appetizer dinner. There was something else planned but we couldn’t get it together in time. But all was enjoyable and enjoyed. 🙂 Yum! On the menu were cucumber slices and Trader Joe’s Tzatziki Creamy Garlic Cucumber Dip; sliced bread and Trader Joe’s Spinach Dip; Trader Joe’s Mini Greek Spirals & Mini Quiche Duo; and some chicken…I can’t remember the specifics.

Half-Hour #2

We watched a slideshow of some of our favorite moments of the year. The photo on the laptop is of my sister and Melody at Melody’s 10th birthday dinner. 🙂

Half-Hour #3

Everyone was able to choose one game/activity to play. Since we only had 30 minutes, we only played one round of each game. Like I mentioned, it was funny to see what we chose because they are all things we usually would win.

– Emily chose *Mancala.
– Melody chose the *World GeoPuzzle. *Individual continent puzzles are also available.
– I chose *Boggle. We have the travel edition but it looks like they don’t make it anymore. There are various editions, like *Boogle Junior, *Super Big Boggle, *Scrabble Boggle, and more!
– Norm chose *Jenga. There are various versions of this one too!

Half-Hour #4

Dessert time! Emily chose Trader Joe’s Sea Salt Brownies. One of our fave vacation activities is watching TV since we don’t own a TV, so I figured I’ve watched enough cooking/baking shows to do some sort of fancy plating. It goes to show that there is beauty in the everyday. Add a few chocolate-covered pretzels, raspberries, and powdered sugar, and voila! It’s not going to win any food competitions/shows, but there you have it!

Half-Hour #5

One of our favorites is photo props. We have them out all year and make every visitor who comes through our doors take selfies with them. We typically download new printables to print and/or trace each year. While it is fun, it is also time-intensive. This year, I opted to order some. There were so many fun pieces for a great deal, we put together a small party bag of props, chocolates, and glow stickers for our neighbor friends.  It looks like the company is already prepping for next year because the 2018 kit is not even available on Amazon anymore. BUT you can get your *Valentine’s Day props OR be super duper prepared for *Christmas (this one is a really good deal!! as of the time of this post publishing). There are wedding and baby shower props and much more!

Emily was reading what we were to do for our next half hour.

Half-Hour #6

I received the Growth Mindset New Year Kit from Big Life Journal and thought it would be a fun one to work through. Even if we didn’t all fill out all the worksheets, I think it was so helpful to review and reflect on our year, as well as look ahead to dreams and goals. (We’ve been meaning to tell you about the *Big Life Journal and haven’t had a chance to put words to the screen yet.)

I was hoping we would continue our celebration but we lost steam the next few days as some of us were still weary from all the holiday activities and sickness. BUT if you were wondering what was planned, we usually watch the countdown of other countries (we did do this at my parents’ house and we watched Paris, Australia (so good!), Hong Kong, London, New York, and maybe a few others), *glowstick dance party to our traditional NYE *dance party tunes (we always have glowsticks available because we buy a lot to pass out during Halloween for the Teal Pumpkin Project, and of course, we do the countdown to whatever time zone we can stay awake until. 🙂 And we would toast to a new year with some sparkling cider and apple juice (the girls do not like fizzy stuff).

It didn’t go as planned but we still had a bunch of fun.

HAPPY NEW YEAR from the Moys!

How was your New Year’s Eve? Did you go out or stay in? Do tell!

*Note: This post may contain affiliate links. Read our disclosure policy here.