New Year's Eve with Kids

Pick a time — eight or nine o’clock. Do the whole thing properly rather than as a token gesture, because the point is that it should feel real.

1. Fifteen minutes before, hand out hats, noisemakers and glow sticks. Build the anticipation.
2. Ten minutes before, pour sparkling juice into proper stemmed glasses. This matters more to children than anything else on the list.
3. Five minutes before, everyone into one room, lights down, countdown on a screen.
4. Count down from ten out loud. Loudly.
5. Noise, toast, and that is New Year.

Ten minutes of effort and they have had the experience. The adults still get midnight, quietly, later.

Glow sticks over almost anything else. With the lights down they are genuinely magical to a six-year-old, they cost very little, and they occupy attention for an hour.

Quieter noisemakers. Blowouts and shakers rather than horns. A horn indoors, in a room of twenty, held by a seven-year-old who has discovered it works, is a long evening.

Stemmed shatterproof glasses. The single thing that makes children feel part of it. Sparkling juice in a plastic flute is an event; the same juice in a beaker is Tuesday.

Balloons. The only decoration under-tens genuinely care about, and the backdrop will be played with all evening.

Check small-parts warnings if there are toddlers, and skip confetti entirely — it goes in mouths and stays in the carpet.

The difficult stretch is six to eight, when children are excited, it is dark, and the adults are setting up.

• A film, started at six. Unglamorous and completely effective.
• Let them help build the balloon backdrop. Genuinely useful, occupies an hour, and they are proud of it afterward.
• A craft table — paper crowns, decorating the glasses with markers, a resolution sheet they read out at the countdown.
• Their own food table at a low height, laid out before the adults eat, so they are not queuing behind twenty grown-ups.

The point of the early countdown is not only that children enjoy it. It is that the party has a clear hinge, after which the evening changes.

• Set up the sleeping arrangements early. Before anyone arrives, not at ten with a tired child.
• Have a room with a film in it for children who are winding down but not asleep.
• Tell other parents the plan in advance. They will be relieved. Most of them were dreading the same question.
• Accept that some will still be awake at midnight. Have a second round of glow sticks in a drawer.

Feed them early and separately, around six. Trying to feed children from an adult buffet at nine produces a queue of frustrated small people and a plate of things they will not eat.

Keep it simple and hold it the same way you hold everything else — a small slow cooker of meatballs or a tray of sausages on a warming tray covers it, and the same 140F rule applies. Our party food guide covers the rest of the evening.