Happy New Year 2016

It has been quit some time since I have been able to sit down and get back to my blogging, the holiday season has been a whirlwind, and kept me very busy. Although this holiday was super busy, I really enjoyed celebrating with my family.

I made all of our traditional Christmas Cookies, and had fun wrapping everyone's gifts in the beautiful wrapping paper I found this year. My favorite wrapping paper this year was the antlers on blue background as well as a gold faux bois patterned paper, I also found some beautiful light pink and glittery vintage looking paper to wrap all of the girl's gifts. We spent time with family on Christmas Eve and Christmas Day, which I really enjoyed.

The following week I got my Christmas decorations down and put up my New Year's Eve decorations. I love decorating for New Year's Eve, it is one of my favorite holidays. I kept out a lot of gold candles and things that I had used for Christmas, as well as some of my New Year's Eve decor from year's past like my glittered clocks.

I decided to keep out the bear I used to decorate our Christmas mantel, and added some antler candle holders I found on clearance after Christmas, and burned our Champagne Toast Bath and Body Works Candle which smelled wonderful! :)

I made our traditional appetizers, every year I make a cheese and cracker platter, bacon wrapped dates, a batch of homemade Chex Mix, Chips and Dip, A Brie En Croute with fruit and bread, crescent wrapped li'l smokies, and Cinnamon Palmiers for dessert along with fresh apples, grapes and mandarin oranges. We also had sparkling limeade, and sparkling cider. The food was delicious and we snacked on it for lunch the days following New Year's Eve.

I thought it would be fun to set up a photo station with different photo props, we played records on my new record player that my hubby and I got for Christmas, which was really fun. We also played board games throughout the evening.

I set out lots of noise makers and confetti poppers of various types. We also had a big confetti stick that used compressed air to send out a big shower of very pretty confetti. My kids and my young niece and nephew had fun playing with all the confetti, it was everywhere and it actually looked quite wonderful covering every surface of the living room, it was no problem cleaning it up and well worth the effort for how much fun the kids had playing in it! :) We of course made lots of noise with our clackers and poppers and horns when the clock struck midnight! :)

I set out candy dishes with "kisses for midnight" and we toasted the new year with sparkling cider. We stayed up late and had a great time, then spent New Year Day relaxing and eating good food and watching movies. Overall it was a wonderful way to kick off 2016!

Here is a short video I made of our New Year's Eve 2016 celebration.

I hope everyone had a nice start to the New Year. I am going to spend the rest of the week getting things a bit more organized around here, cleaning up from the holidays, and then I hope to spend more time on my blog this year. I have some organization goals for this year that I intend to share about over the next month.

Thanks for stopping by and Happy New Year!

Linking to:
Be Inspired
A Wise Women Link Up
Wake Up Wednesday
Tuesday With A Twist