My family has been celebrating New Year's Eve together for, I don't know, ten or more years? It seems to be the easiest holiday for everyone to get together, so we usually have some sort of shindig to ring in the new year. It has gotten progressively more involved as more people have come into the family (need to entertain the little ones somehow). One year, as Eliza pointed out in a comment on my last post, our cousin Karl showed up with tons of snack foods and my brother in-law Bruce cleaned my parents' fridge, and for many years after that year, that was considered the best celebration we'd ever had. So, you know. I kind of wanted to kick it up a notch in addition to the other things we typically do (like reading predictions we'd made the previous year) so I proposed a casual talent show. It ended up being a ton of fun! My parents' living room doesn't really accommodate 20+ people very well, so we took advantage of the great night weather and set up shop outside.
Everyone's acts were awesome. To wit:
Bonny's family sang and acted out a song
Porter demonstrated his talent of building things
Eliza did impersonations of my parents and David yelled "GOOOOOOOAL!" for about a minute
Matt taught everyone how to make origami frogs
Robbie and I played a duet on the Melodica and guitar
The older grandkids did a (somewhat) synchronized Pogo stick routine
My parents and Noah did a Garrison Keillor-inspired skit that was pretty hilarious
Phoebe's family sang "The Nativity Song" to end the quiet evening
Other talents not pictured: Eve doing the splits, Harry William blowing a bubble with his gum, and Eliza's family singing "If the Savior Stood Beside Me" (which was mostly Eliza and Matt singing it while Ida and Theo looked perplexed.
We rounded out the night with other fun activities:
Reading/listening to 2011 predictions
Playing with various Apple devices
And Isla fed potato chips to a rubber lizard
All in all, a great success. Does anyone have any awesome New Year's Eve traditions to share? I'm constantly on the lookout for fun ideas.
These are so fun!I wish I could see a video of all these performances! So cute! and you can play the Melodica?! That's awesome! :o)
ReplyDeleteBesides wishing I had as exciting of a New Year's party, I now wish I had a "Cereal, It's What's for Dinner" t-shirt like the boy that is in the picture singing the Nativity Song. Or a cool black eye like the girl next to him.
ReplyDeletemy family's new years tradition is to play a LOT of games [like for 5 hours straight??] and have root beer floats at midnight. but i am really loving this talent/variety show idea...especially you and robbie's duet. so darn cute!
ReplyDeleteWe do add a certain panache to the whole holiday, don't we?? We are Terrills, after all! Terrillific I would say! (and humble too!)
ReplyDeleteWe play bingo! With prizes! Usually a new calendar for each person is one of the prizes, but this year there was no calendar store in the mall. And very few in the stores.(in my town) and part of the tradition is I buy them in the half off sales between Christmas and New Years, but there were few to be found on sale. So this year no calendars (sad) But there were Lord of the Ring Pez dispensers, so it was all ok.
ReplyDeleteA friend gave me the idea of a taste-test party. We decided to adapt it into a root beer party. Part 1: blind taste test identification. We had five kinds of grocery store root beer and tried to identify them. It was hard and fun. Part 2: Best root beer. We added a bunch of fancy root beers to the mix and everyone decided which was their favorite. We were also going to have a part three with root beer floats but it didn't happen and that was fine. It was a fun time. Love the picture of feeding the lizard. Kids know how to have a good time.
ReplyDeleteI told you - they weren't impersonations! The Clayton Stare if a talent!
ReplyDeleteI love Henry's shirt too.
Spelling with auto correct, however, if not one of my talents.
ReplyDeleteI love your family so much! Can the Cards come celebrate with you guys next new year? We are so few in numbers!
ReplyDeleteHey, the Cards can come - and even enter the talent show!! In-laws and outlaws are welcome too!
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