December 31st-January 1st, 2012- Starting New New Year’s Traditions!

     Since we had so much fun starting our Christmas Advent tradition this year, I decided we needed to come up with some New Year’s Eve and New Year’s Day traditions too. As usual, from a tiny atoll in the Pacific where you cannot stop by the local bookstore or pop into a specialty or party store to see what’s available in the “starting family traditions” department, I headed for the internet. Of course, we have always had the tradition in my family of staying up until midnight to “watch the ball drop” on TV and having black eyed peas and ham hocks on New Year’s Day for good luck, but that’s it, and I wanted something more.  Plus, we can’t “watch the ball drop” because it hasn’t dropped in New Year when it’s already midnight here across the International Date Line.

     There were so many ideas, I decided to print out my favorites (or the ones I thought we’d be most likely to do), and talk to the boys at the lunch table to see which ones they agree upon.  Here’s what we did:  “Fortune Tree” and “An Ancient Tradition.”  The fortune tree consisted of everyone finding small objects around the house, which would symbolize something “fortunate,” such as a coin for wealth, a matchbox car for travel, etc…My oldest loves fortune cookies, so this was perfect for him, and he turned out to be quite good at it, writing down enough fortunes that we each had two to choose instead of just one. The idea is that you write a fortune to go with the object, then you wrap it up and “hang it on the tree like an ornament to pick out at midnight.  The boy’s objects were too big to hang on the tree, so we wrapped them all up individually in tissue paper and put them under the tree instead, and since no one (except my fiancé) was able to stay up until midnight, we moved it to a “noon day” fortune picking today.  That turned out to be my favorite tradition this year.  The others included having fondue for dinner last night (I did not realize that a lot of people have fondue on New Year’s Eve), and making not just black-eyed peas, but some “Hopping John” for our meal today.  We also made peanut butter pancakes with bananas and honey roasted peanuts on top for breakfast, but since we usually make some type of pancakes every weekend, I suppose that wasn’t so much of a new tradition. J 

     Last, but certainly not least, we completed the ancient tradition of writing down some bad habit or luck we wanted to get rid of and burned it in in our “propane fireplace” outside before making s’mores, and we wrote a “predictions/accomplishments” letter to ourselves to be opened next year and see what we got right.  And now, well I am catching up on my blog since one of my New Year’s resolutions is to get back to writing and blogging more like once a week instead of once a month.  Happy 2012!!