New Year’s Eve | DIY Decorating

A new year, new beginning, a fresh start, a clean slate…

The start of a new year gives us all the opportunity to make new goals and plans for ourselves, feel renewed and reinvigorated to take on the world. But we must first say auvoir to last year…and what better way than to throw a party! Over the last several years, we’ve thrown a New Year’s Eve party to celebrate the passing of the year before and ringing in the year ahead together. Every night evolves into playing drinking games, a guitar jam session by some of our favorite hometown musicians, and inevitably poppers and confetti everywhere. We never run out of food and the options are never dull. We’ve had gumbo, venison, goose, scallops, elk, and more appetizer choices than we even need.

Feeling settled this year, we decided last minute to return to our tradition of ringing in the New Year surrounded by our friends…this time with the friends we’ve made in Rwanda. After realizing that we likely either stored or threw out all our old decorations and with no time to have anything shipped, I set out to repurpose what I had and dig deep into my creative side. Over the last year, my husband and I have both noted how much we haven’t needed a lot of what we brought with us. We’ve recognized that we really can do with less and I’ve found it helps inspire my craftsy side. Decorating for New Year’s was no exception.

Adorning our house in gold and silver, glitz and glam was easy with a good base of candles, vases, ornaments, and other Christmas decorations I already had on hand. I used light colored and gold frames to display New Year’s signage…in fact, wrapping paper was used for the one in our entry way. I’ve always wondered what my rationale was for bringing along 3 un-used canvases with us…not even realizing they left me with a blank canvas to use for decorations. One I wrapped in silver paper and made 2016 numbers out of construction paper. The ornaments and a silver ribbon made a great entryway greeting. The other, I wrapped in black wrapping/craft paper and used silver and gold sharpies for everyone to write out their answers to the question “What’s Your Resolution?” And, to add a touch of Rwanda to our tables, I found two small coordinating baskets in black and tan/gold.

And, I have to give a ton of credit to my husband for being the reason our party all came together. He earned quite a bit of marriage capital by running errands all day while I had to work, spending the day of and night before chopping, dicing, mincing, and mixing. He was a great sport about it and although I definitely planned to do too much, we got it all done. His great eye also managed to find the perfect gold and silver glittered hats stashed away on the very top shelf of the store. Of course, over a week later we still have glitter every where in our house and some still speckle people’s cheeks or hairline leaving a lasting impression of the great night we all had.

Curious about our menu, here it is: blue cheese and pecan spread, meatballs, selection of cheeses (brought from our trip to Germany) and meats with apple and bread slices, pineapple and watermelon salad, spinach and artichoke dip, antipasta skewers, cinnamon sugar pecans, 7 layer peppermint bars, oreo truffles with gold & silver sprinkles, and popcorn with maple butter and cayenne pepper.

The selection was complete with the addition of hummus, cheesecakes with strawberry topping, and jello shots our friends brought, and more champagne than we needed.

We are now ready to start this new year off on the right foot. As part of that, I promise to make up for missed posts over the last two months and update you on what we’ve been up to.