The Balloon Countdown: A Family-Friendly New Year Tradition
After having children the dynamics of celebrating New Year's Eve has changed significantly. Unless we can get a baby sitter and actually muster enough energy to leave the house then gone are the late-night parties, dancing and fireworks. Over the years our kids have become more and more interested in celebrating the New Year. Having the kids stay up until 10pm is usually bad enough so occupying them all the way till midnight seemed like a mammoth task. However a couple of years ago I had a lightbulb idea and born was our annual ‘Family Balloon Countdown’. On the hour each hour someone gets to pop a balloon and out drops a fun task, activity or clue to the location of something fun like snacks for the evening!
Our kids have enjoyed this so much and it’s been great fun thinking of what to put in the balloons. If you’d like to try it here are the instructions and a few ideas below.
How to Create a Balloon Countdown
Creating a Balloon Countdown is simple, and it can be tailored to suit children of various ages. Here's how you can do it:
Materials Needed:
Balloons - You'll need one for each hour you plan to celebrate, starting from 6 PM. OR one for every half hour if your kids are impatient like mine were!
Small pieces of paper
Pen or markers
Challenges, activities, or clues (some ideas are at the bottom of this blog)
Steps:
Plan Your Countdown: Decide how many hours you want to celebrate leading up to midnight. For example, if you start at 6 PM, you might have seven balloons in total.
Prepare Challenges or Activities: Write down challenges, activities, or clues on the small pieces of paper. Make sure they are age-appropriate and fun for your children. Here are some ideas to get you started:
Location of evening snacks
Instructions for everyone to get dressed up
Play a family board game
Clue to the location of midnight party poppers
Fun tasks like "tell a silly joke" or "dance like nobody's watching"
Place the Notes Inside Balloons: Roll up the notes and place one inside each balloon before you blow it up. You can even include little sweets inside the balloons if you can cram them in.
Inflate the Balloons: Blow up the balloons and tie them off.
Set the Countdown Times: We used marker pens to write the ‘pop time’ on each balloon so we didn’t forget which ones needed popping and I could order the tasks I wanted the kids to do.
Pop the Balloons: When the designated hour arrives, it's time to pop the corresponding balloon! Have a designated family member pop it, and watch as the challenge or activity inside is revealed.
The Balloon Countdown is highly adaptable, making it suitable for children of all ages. You can adjust the challenges to fit your kids' abilities and interests - check out my suggestions below
Tips for little kids
If the kids are young enough it’s possible to do a ‘kid on’ New Year and everyone heads to bed at 10pm. We’ve done this many a time. Just alter everything by a few hours and pop your midnight balloon at 10pm. Don’t forget - kids are smart. If you’ve any eager time tellers then make sure you alter every clock in the house or they’ll demand an extra 2 hours of awake time. No one wants that.
‘BANG’ accommodation - if your littles might be frightened of popping then use zip lock bags and hang them up instead.
Balloon contents ideas
Clue: Snack location - adapt for age with difficulty of clue
Instruction: Head upstairs and get your snazziest glad rags on and return ready to party (you can up the fun here by instructing family members choose outfits for each other!)
Activity: Each family member has to make up a dance move and everyone has to try and copy. Craziest, most unachievable move wins.
Contents: mini sweeties in wrappers inside balloon
Activity: ‘we have a new family game’ check under the____ to discover what it is. OR ‘lets play the old family favourite_______’
Activity: ‘It’s portrait time’ Choose your art weapons (everyone collects paper/pens/paints) and paints a random family member from memory. Everyone has to guess who each other has painted. Setting a timer is a tension building addition to this activity.
Activity: It’s disco time. Roll a dice and the person who rolls the highest is DJ. Get your moves on. You can let each family member take a 5 minute slot as DJ each.
Clue: Location of midnight celebration basket - this could be a shoe box or any hamper filled with party poppers/ a wee dram / the champers / fun treats. Make sure this isn’t the midnight clue or it’ll be too late to pop the poppers!
Activity: Musical bumps/statues
Pass the parcel: you can adapt this well for older kids by making it REALLY hard to unwrap. A layer of duct tape or a chain with a padlock code and a maths question could really up this to a great teenage activity. How about a booby prize in the middle for laughs?
‘Activity’ : one of the activities I put in the first year we did it was QUICK let’s have a tidy competition. Each child took a room and I came and judged how tidy they were. Winners got a box of chocolates. This was AMAZING and they did a really good job haha.
Activity: AMONG US - this is good for older kids who know the online game. kind of like walking wink murder and the game can go on all evening if you put it in one of the early on balloons. Everyone picks a secret card and one card has IMPOSTER written on it (all others are blank or say crew mate) the Imposter has to ‘kill’ everyone in the room without being noticed. They do this by touching other players on the shoulder who then have to play dead. Once known dead they can put a hat on to avoid dead/ alive confusion and then they don’t have to lie on the floor all evening!