Celebrate New Year’s Eve at Home with the Kids

Happy New Year, readers!  This past week, we celebrated New Year’s Eve at home with the kids.  2020 has been QUITE a year of ups and downs.  While eager to usher in a New Year, I am also grateful for many things that have happened this past year. 

We were incredibly lucky to take a trip to Disney World before the pandemic hit.  While there, I married my best friend in the company of our daughters and enjoyed the trip of a lifetime.  Later this year, we also received the joyful news that we would be having our third child (and first boy!).  Being quarantined together afforded us the opportunity to spend a lot of time together as a family. It also inspired me to start this blog!  We were also fortunate to spend time with our extended family while keeping everyone healthy.  I am incredibly grateful that despite its challenges, 2020 was a pretty great year for our family.    

Countdown to the New Year

I love celebrating New Year’s Eve at home with the kids and coming up with fun activities to do throughout the evening.  My favorite way to do this, is by creating an hourly countdown of activities to keep the kids entertained until midnight.  With a surprise awaiting every hour, it makes the countdown to midnight that much more exciting!  For our countdown, I hang several balloons which each contain an activity suggestion inside.  The balloons are also labeled with what time they should be popped.  On each hour, the kids take turn popping a balloon and sharing what activity we have in store for the next hour.  It never ceases to amaze me how much joy the kids exude just from simply popping a balloon!  The fun activity is just an added bonus. 😉 

This article will outline what our hourly breakdown of New Year’s activities looked like this year.  I hope some of these ideas inspire your very own New Year’s celebration at home with the kids.  There are ENDLESS ways to incorporate some family fun into your celebration that I’m sure I haven’t even thought of!  Be sure to let me know how you like to celebrate New Year’s Eve at home with the kids in the comments! 

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5:00 – Spa Treatments

We began our countdown by promptly popping our first balloon at 5:00pm.  Our activity for the hour: Spa Treatments!  What better way to start a New Year than giving your body a little TLC?  I dug out all of my nail care tools, skincare masks, lotions, and foot soak supplies.  My husband even got in on the fun doing a beard mask.  Spa treatments aren’t just for the ladies, you know!  I was grateful to have my 12-year-old paint my toenails for me.  Being at the very end of my pregnancy, I knew there was no way I’d be able to reach and do it myself!  2021 – Here we come, feeling good in our own skin! 

6:00 – New Years Eve Madlibs and Happy New Year Interview

We kicked off the 6:00pm hour by filling out some fun New Year’s Eve themed Madlibs!  I must confess…I was EXTREMELY disappointed in the lack of knowledge my family demonstrated when it came to adjectives, verbs, and adverbs.  Don’t they teach this stuff in school anymore?!  Even my husband needed a crash course, but I hope it was an educating experience for everyone ha!  For our Madlibs, I found a couple free templates at Dating Divas and The Idea Room. Amazon also has an awesome Madlibs book that is completely New Years themed.  You can check it out by clicking HERE!

After our Madlibs fun, I interviewed each family member with a few questions regarding their favorite parts of the past year and what they look forward to in the New Year. 

You can download a printable version of my interview form here:

This is a fun activity to do each year, then go back and look at what your family has reflected on in past years.  If you don’t like saving pieces of paper (I know I’ll just lose them!), save a screen shot of the interview questions to your phone.  Then fill in the answers your family members give with your editing tools and save the finished interview to your photos.  This will make it easy to find and pull up interviews from past years!

7:00 – Board Games

We LOVE playing games as a family.  We are also VERY competitive, so we knew celebrating New Year’s Eve at home with the kids would not be complete without challenging each other to some of our favorite games.  This year, we played a new game that my four-year-old received as a Christmas present – Silly Faces.  This is a great game if you have younger pre-school aged children.  The object of the game is to collect all the stickers you need to create a silly face character (eyes, nose, hair, etc.).  It gets challenging when you steal each other’s characters or are forced to discard a facial feature!  If you have younger children, I think this would be a great game to get them involved.  You can check it out on Amazon HERE!

By the time we finished up Silly Faces, my four-year-old was off doing her own thing.  This meant the big kids could play!  Our favorite game to play with our 12-year-old is the card game – Fluxx.  This game starts out simple as you draw one card and play one card.  But the addition of New Rule cards and ever-changing Goal cards keeps players on their toes!  There are TONS of different themed versions of this card game ranging from Pirates, Marvel, and Spongebob.  But our go-to during this season is Holiday Fluxx (of course)!  There are even specific cards that reward you for playing on an actual holiday, so of course we had to take advantage of that!  We have seven different versions of this card game that we play all the time, I can’t recommend it enough!      

If you’re looking for an extra challenging game (but still very fun!), be sure to check out Disney Villainous. We love playing with our oldest and visiting friends.

8:00 – Year in Review Photo Presentation

One of my favorite ways to celebrate New Year’s Eve at home with the kids is to look back on all our adventures from the past year.  Before our party, I spend some time going through EVERY SINGLE PHOTO I’ve taken from January to December to create a slideshow for the family.  This is also a great opportunity to go through some photos that can be trashed and free up some space on your phone or camera!  It’s so much fun to look back on everything we enjoyed together and reminisce about some of our favorite memories.

9:00 – Movie and Late-Night Snacks

Once 9:00pm rolls around, the family is usually ready to get comfy on the couch and veg out.  We usually have a large assortment of Christmas treats and snacks left over that we spread out for everyone to pick at.  In years past, we have also done fondue which the girls have had a lot of fun with!  For our movie, we knew we had to check out Disney Pixar’s newest film, Soul!  We thought it was a cute and unique movie which the whole family enjoyed.

10:30 – Silly String Fight

Seeing as how a movie would last longer than an hour, we pushed our next activity back to 10:30 – Silly String Fight!  While not my favorite activity of the night (it’s MESSY), the kids always have a blast running wild.  I usually stock up on silly string from the dollar store to keep expenses low.  After the fight…everyone gets to help clean up the mess for mom’s sanity!  I refuse to start the New Year with a messy home!

11:00 – Walt Disney World Fireworks

Since we are in the Midwest (and central time), we like to spend the 11:00pm hour watching the New Year get rang in on the east coast!  One of our favorite ways to do this is watch the New Year’s Eve fireworks display at Walt Disney World Resort.  Oftentimes we can find a livestream of the celebration.  Due to COVID this year (and the temporary discontinuation of firework displays in the parks) we decided to look up a video from last year’s celebration on Youtube.  The girls dug out their light-up wands, wore their Minnie ears, and recreated some of the magic that you feel in the parks during the fireworks!     

11:50 – Horns, Party Poppers, Bubbly, and Fireworks

This is it…the big moment!  A mere 10 minutes before the New Year!  We used this time to pass out our noise horns, party poppers, and glasses of sparkling cider and champagne.  If you live in an area where they allow fireworks, they also make a great addition to your New Year’s celebration.  No matter your preferred method to ring in the New Year, be sure to grab your family close and pass out those kisses at midnight!  Cheers to a fantastic New Year with those you love! 

How do you celebrate New Year’s Eve at home with the kids?  Do you have any fun activities or traditions you share together?  Let me know in the comments!

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