How We Celebrate New Year’s Eve {Bookish Traditions}

Also known as cozy, bookish, in-bed-by-10 ways to celebrate New Year’s Eve!

The post-Christmas crash and anticipating the dreary wintry months hit me (and the kids) hard ever year. For New Year’s Eve we’ve created a hygge evening in which we aim to savor the time together, reflect on the past year, and gently say farewell to the Christmas season while building in some anticipation for the next season.

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Here’s what our New Year’s Eve with 3 kids looks like :

We have our final Shepherds’ Feast of the season beside the Christmas tree. I wrote a whole post about how we prepare our Shepherds’ Feast. It’s a beloved family tradition loosely based around the idea of eating a meal that harkens back to the shepherds of Jesus’ time. It’s essentially kid-friendly charcuterie on a picnic blanket on our living room floor.

2. During or after dinner, depending on attention spans, we pull out our family gratitude journal and reminisce about the year past. If you don’t have a family gratitude journal 1. start one next year (I highly recommend it!), and 2. you could look through your photo books or camera roll, or just ask the kids to recall their most treasured memories.

3. Next is a part that I prep ahead of time. The days before NYE, I go through our log of books read during the past year and print a page with all of the book covers. (Family read alouds, not picture books or their independent reading) Then we vote on our top favorite books and tally the results to reveal our family’s top 3 read alouds. I don’t limit them much in their voting– it’s generally something like “if you really liked reading that title, let’s put a tally mark beside it.” You could be much more detail oriented and create a rating system or sub categories (by genre? audiobooks?).

Inevitably the book voting is a sweet time of recalling our experience with that story- memories attached to it, favorite scenes, surprise endings. I just love that time so much!

4. This year I’m adding a new element to our New Year’s Eve as a way of bringing some anticipation to the next season. It can be HARD to leave Christmas behind– for kids but also for myself. To that end, we are going to make a winter bucket list.

On that bucket list I’m going to include our family read alouds for January, too! I’ll share the summaries and essentially “booktalk” those to get the kids amped up. I’ve selected a book for school, a book for fun, and an audiobook for the car.