New Year Family Traditions Worth Starting

Most family new year traditions fail on the second year, and the reason is always the same: the first attempt was too ambitious to repeat.

A tradition is something you have done twice. That is the whole definition. So the useful question is not what would be a lovely thing to do, it is what would we definitely still be able to do next year when somebody is ill and somebody else is away.

The letter to next year

If you do one thing, do this. It is the highest-return family tradition I know of and it costs a pen and an envelope.

Everyone writes a short letter to themselves, to be opened next New Year's Eve. What is happening now, what they are worried about, what they want to have happened by the time they read it. Sealed, put in a box, forgotten.

The first year it feels slightly silly. The second year, opening the previous ones, it becomes the event of the evening, and by year five it is the reason the family does anything at all on 31 December.

Small children can draw rather than write. Somebody has to be in charge of the box, and it should be the same person every year.

Children and midnight

Nobody benefits from a five year old at midnight, including the five year old.

Hold your own countdown earlier. Eight o'clock works, nine for older ones. Count down properly, make the noise, do the whole thing, then bed. Children do not care what time it is, they care that it happened, and a countdown at eight that everybody takes seriously is indistinguishable from the real one to anybody under about nine.

The other thing that works is a New Year's morning tradition instead of a night-time one. A specific breakfast, a walk, a swim if your family is that way inclined. Children remember mornings better and adults are considerably more capable of them.

Look back, not just forward

The mistake most new year traditions make is being entirely about the year ahead.

Resolutions, hopes, plans. All forward-facing, all abstract, and none of it produces anything to return to.

Add a looking-back element and the whole thing improves. Each person names the best day of the year and why. A list of everything the family did, written together, which is always longer than anyone expects and reliably surprises the person who spent December feeling like nothing happened.

Writing it down matters. A family that keeps a page a year has something after a decade that no photograph album gives you.

Resolutions, if you must

The American Psychological Association's guidance on this is worth reading before the family sits down and commits to eleven impossible things.

Their advice is to start small, giving the example of aiming for three or four days at the gym rather than seven. Change one behavior at a time. Talk about it and use social support rather than doing it alone. And expect setbacks without treating one slip as a failure of the whole thing. Lynn Bufka, quoted there, makes the point that small attainable goals through the year work better than a single overwhelming goal on 1 January.

For a family, the practical version is one goal each, said out loud, small enough to be embarrassing. And a rule that nobody is allowed to comment on anybody else's.

Auld Lang Syne, and why

Worth knowing what you are singing, because almost nobody does.

Robert Burns wrote the words down in 1788, working from older material including a version published by Allan Ramsay in 1724, and the phrase means something like times long past. National Geographic notes that Hogmanay grew in importance in Scotland after the Church of Scotland banned Christmas in 1640, and that Guy Lombardo's 1929 broadcast did a great deal to fix the song at midnight in America, though a musicologist quoted in the same piece points out it was already established in many communities.

It is a song about remembering people, which is a better fit for the evening than most people realize while they are humming the verse they do not know.

Why 1 January at all

If somebody at the table asks, the answer involves two calendar reforms.

The US Naval Observatory sets out that Julius Caesar's calendar of 45 BC standardized the vernal equinox at 21 March and introduced a leap day every four years, and that Pope Gregory XIII reformed it in 1582, specifically to correct the drift affecting the date of Easter, adding the rule that century years are leap years only when divisible by 400.

One thing done every single year

Whatever you pick, the value is in the repetition rather than the idea.

A photograph in the same place. The same first question. A song about the family, played once, which is what we make at Ditty City, so treat that as interested rather than neutral. Custom song for parents has more on that.

For a version aimed at two people rather than a family, a New Years Eve box for couples. For gifts, new year gift ideas, and the celebration ideas hub has more.