Ah….Yes.
The holiday right after Christmas.
New Years or New Year’s Eve.
Is coming upon us which means counting down that final hour, hanging out with family and/or friends, going out to New Year’s Eve events and parties, drinking some champagne (if you’re into that), watching the game (if games are played on or around New Year’s Eve?… I’m not much of a sports person, cut me some slack), taking a vacation with a special someone or maybe just taking a trip by yourself and I can’t forget about making the New Year’s resolutions!
Making all the wonderful plans to celebrate the New Year while also saying goodbye to the old one. But have you ever considered celebrating New Year’s at home?
And no, I am not talking about gathering all at someone’s house and hanging out with each other on the New Year.
I’m talking about COVID like New Year’s, where social distance was big, everybody masked up, and restrictions for doing things were very high. Of course, like everyone else, I also had to go through this but I managed to do some things with my loved ones that I think a lot of people might not know about or probably don’t think about doing. And for the record, I am a HUGE introvert, so I already don’t like going out because my energy drains a lot when I do, so COVID helped me adjust to some New Year’s Eve curves that maybe I can introduce to you and maybe you can incorporate them into your own New Year’s traditions or add them to your already New Year traditions!
Let me introduce you to….the….
NEW YEAR’S EVE INDOOR TRADITION IDEA EXTRAVAGANZA!!
(…..I need to work on that title…)
Idea 1: Netflix Special Distance Countdown.
This one dates back way before COVID. I know, I probably shouldn’t start off with this one first but I felt like this one was reasonable to put in, not only because it still connects to the topic but also because it was the first thing in my mind.
Now, when my grandmother was living in another state, my mom and her planned to celebrate New Year’s by watching Netflix specials that center around the New Year’s Eve countdown. At this time my grandmother lived in another state and we missed her very dearly. Plus she was by herself for the holidays, which now that I think about it makes me wanna cry.
What we did was pick a special we wanted to watch, we voted on the “All Hail King Julian: New Year’s Eve Countdown” (It was actually my younger sibling who picked it and it was just a bonus for us because all three of us LOVED “Madagascar''), we then called her up, selected the special we wanted to watch, played it on her time and then on our time and counted down the clock. It was really messy and not planned out in an organized way and sadly we only did it once but you get the picture. Sometimes we have loved ones by themselves in another state, friend or family. And we want to include that person but we can’t. So if you are looking to do something small and simple, have a New Year’s Eve Netflix Special Countdown, it would not only be fun but also really sweet, especially for a family member.
Idea 2: The Discord and Messenger Host Party.
Listen, Discord has become extremely popular lately and I am pretty sure if you’re like me, you get tired of the talk or mention of Discord. Even more so, if you have been around Discord for a long time ( I have only been around discord since 2017 - 2018 so basically 5-6 years) but you can use Discord as a great option to celebrate the New Year’s with friends. But so is Messenger.
Yes! I know! Messenger is kinda old and I honestly don’t hear or see too many people talking on or about Messenger, but it is also a great app to celebrate with friends.
I am going to go with the Messenger route since that's the one I have used before. This was around the time it was 2020, so of course COVID just had recently started and, at the time, I had a group of friends that I really wanted to celebrate New Years Eve with, but obviously we couldn't do that. So I came up with this plan to celebrate by doing an online New Year's Eve party on Messenger. I already had things planned out to some degree. Playing some games was really the only thing I thought about doing, and also maybe doing some karaoke and listening to some music while we count down the time for the brand new year.
And just like I mentioned before, you can do the exact same thing on Discord. Though I think Discord will be a little bit easier to do than on Messenger. You see, with Discord you have channels. Let's say that you're hosting a New Year's Eve Discord party, and you have things already planned. You have some gaming channel plans, you have some art channels plans, you have writing channel plans. Like I said, you have a list of ideas that you want to do for that New Year's party. But what if there is somebody that joins the New Year's party but doesn't really wanna join the gaming channel? Well, you can go on ahead and you could have them join the art channel with the plans that are in the art channel or you can do something in the writer channel and have something fun to do there. Or maybe have something fun like a storytelling channel. Do you kind of see where I'm going?
With the Discord, you have a plethora of options for things that people just don't want to do. For Messenger, you don't really have that option, since when you're in a group chat, you're basically all in the group chat. And sure, you can mute yourself, but maybe that person will feel a little excluded. But just like you can go on ahead and play games and communicate with your friends on Discord and Messenger, you can also watch parties as well. Now I feel like the watch parties are something that needs an entire paragraph to themselves, but I'll probably try to explain a little bit of it while I'm still on the topic of Discord and messenger watch parties.
Now I do not know how it works on Discord that much since I'm barely on Discord and I'm trying to do better, but I will explain how watch parties work a little bit on messenger. When you want to do a watch party or a watch together on a messenger, all you have to do is start a messenger video call or create a messenger room. Then of course, there's going to be an access menu, once you swipe up and you can select watch together, you can watch things like TV or Movies, watched or uploaded, but I don't really know how far it really goes since of course when me and my friends did this, we all went on ahead and watch nothing but YouTube videos.
Now with Discord, this one was a little iffy. Like I stated before, I'm not on Discord often even though I have it, and I've only known maybe two ways of how you can watch something on Discord. Number one is you can share your screen. Just like how you can watch people stream things on YouTube and/or Twitch, you can also go on ahead and share your screen so you can go ahead and do a watch party there. I learned from a friend that it’s called hosting. The other way I learned that you can do watch parties on Discord is something called sharing. You see, with sharing all participants have control over the playlist and the current video.
If you were to ask me which app I would use to host an online New Year's Eve get together party. I would definitely say messenger. But since I'm trying to get used to Discord, I would definitely say Discord now, because it has a much better advantage that will include almost anybody.
I can definitely go on and talk about the many things that you can do online for New Years for those friends and family that are very far away. Like I stated in the beginning, these are just two ideas that I did with my friends and my family that worked out in the end they were fun, enjoyable and a defiant would do again, and I hope that these are some ideas that maybe you can incorporate into your New Year's tradition or maybe start a brand new New Year's tradition. Just remember to have fun with the ideas and to also incorporate everyone.
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