Hey, New Year’s Folks!
Congratulations! We did it! We made it to the end of another year. Tonight we stand on the horizon and look out to the next one. Bye, 2014; 2015, here we come! We celebrate by staying awake until the new year arrives at midnight. What you do in those late hours before twelve o’ clock strikes is up to you and the people you’re celebrating with.
I think lots of families’ New Year’s Eve traditions tend to follow along the same lines: eat some snacks, watch some movies, and countdown to midnight. I know that was MY family’s tradition. We’d have a diabolical spread in the kitchen where we’d all plate up with snack foods:
Summer sausage, three kinds of cheeses, four different brands of crackers, chips, pickles, olives, carrots, broccoli, celery, vegie dip, mini loaves of rye bread for finger sandwiches, shrimp, and COOKIES! Once you were all plated up, we all convened in the living room where we would go back and forth between watching movies and checking in on the party in Times Square.
Brimming with anticipation, we would get a bunch of games going too. Guesstures (the fast-action version of charades) was a family favorite and Scattergories (the letter-specific word association game) got a lot of play as well. But older than these party games, we had Quizzard. Quizzard is a very old trivia game (from the 80′s) with an electronic buzzer so you had to think fast before somebody else buzzed in.
Of course, come 11:59 pm, we’d countdown to the arrival of the new year with the folks in Time Square—all of us except my mother who was typically already asleep at this point. After that, we’d watch old black and white movies starring Bing Crosby like ‘Going My Way,’ ‘The Bells of St. Mary,’ or ‘Holiday Inn’ until we were all sound asleep.
I hope your New Year’s traditions of ringing in the new year will be as fun as they were in my family when I was growing up. Happy New Year, Everybody. Thanks for reading.
- John