Spending New Year’s Eve at home also offers some advantages in 2022. After all, not everyone likes to crowd through crowded clubs or spend the New Year at public New Year’s Eve parties. In this blog post, we’ll show you the best ideas for activities and games for a New Year’s Eve at home that you’ll remember for a long time to come.
We present special leisure activities here because we offer one ourselves. With its Escape Room Theater, OPOLUM is the future of escape rooms in Hamburg. Because we haven’t just strung together tricky puzzles and wrapped them up in an exciting story. We have made our escape rooms in the Speicherstadt as realistic as possible and taken them to a whole new level. By using actors who actively intervene in our stories, you completely forget that it’s just a game. Our size is also unique: we are the largest escape room in Hamburg.
What are the advantages of New Year’s Eve at home?
The benefits of celebrating New Year’s Eve at home are the relaxed atmosphere and the opportunity to have a quiet chat. When you go to a club or disco, you sometimes stand outside for a long time and freeze before you are finally let in. Inside, it’s loud, often stuffy and the drinks prices don’t exactly set the mood.
If you celebrate New Year’s Eve at home, you can be sure that you will only meet the people you really want to see that evening. And the dress code is simply jeans and a T-shirt.
New Year’s Eve at home ideas – program items for a good New Year’s Eve party
For a successful New Year’s Eve party at home, you should give some thought to the schedule and organization. After all, just chatting, watching TV and gazing deeply into a glass is missing the highlights.
Lead casting
Even the ancient Romans heated lead over a candle flame and poured it into cold water in a flash. They tried to divine the future from the resulting hardened object.
This ancient form of oracle has survived to this day and is practiced every year on New Year’s Eve in a less serious manner – it’s simply fun and everyone is curious about their lead figure. This makes lead casting one of the most traditional games for New Year’s Eve at home.
New Year’s Eve at home theme party
For a successful New Year’s Eve at home, you could, for example, give your home party a specific theme. Tell your guests that this year you are celebrating “like back then” – in other words, with the fashion sins of your youth, when you first celebrated without parents, just with your friends. Of course, you can also play music from the good old days in the background.
Or you can choose a theme from the year 2022 – although there is of course a risk that everyone will be thinking about lockdowns and appear unwashed in their jogging suits.
Typical New Year’s Eve food and drink
To ensure that your New Year’s Eve party at home doesn’t escalate too early, it’s important that everyone involved has a well-filled stomach and that the alcohol doesn’t send most of the party guests into the land of dreams at around 10 pm.
It is therefore advisable to treat the participants to something to eat shortly after they arrive. The culinary classic for a New Year’s Eve at home is undoubtedly a fondue. A meat or cheese fondue means relatively little effort for the host, is fun and can be topped off with a chocolate fondue.
Swiss raclette is also a popular New Year’s Eve feast. If you don’t have a fondue or raclette set at home, you can simply melt the raclette cheese in a pan and place it on the table.
In addition to beer, wine, soda water and fruit juices, sparkling wine should of course not be missing from the list of drinks to buy. In addition to water and beer, red wine goes best with cheese and meat.
After the meal, you can continue with the “fire magic” right away and casually group around a fire tongs punch. You can find a great recipe here.
Games for New Year’s Eve at home
Depending on whether you prefer it quieter or more exciting, you can play board games or party games. Of course, if you allow enough time before midnight, we recommend a game full of adrenaline and goosebumps to get the mood right up to the countdown. The OPOLUM online escape room brings the thrilling atmosphere straight to your New Year’s Eve party – with mysterious stories and exciting puzzles. Find out what to expect and how to book here!
If you want to go to the trouble of making up your own special escape room adventure, here are a few tips: Make your own escape room.
Night hike
A clear New Year’s Eve with an unobstructed view of the firmament invites you to fill your lungs with fresh air and earn the following delicacies of food and drink with a winter hike.
Warn your guests in advance that they should dress warmly and be equipped with sturdy shoes and flashlights. Plan a one-hour romantic or adventurous route with interesting viewpoints in advance. Fill thermos flasks with mulled wine or punch in advance, according to the number of participants, which will then be served at half-time.
A New Year’s Eve hike is only particularly atmospheric in the light of lanterns and torches – in this case, flashlights should only be switched on in an emergency.
If the night hike at your New Year’s Eve at home has whetted your appetite for more exciting outdoor tours, we recommend playing the winter edition of OPOLUM ‘s outdoor escape game with live acting.
Outdoor celebrations
If you don’t want to hike, but still want to celebrate New Year’s Eve at home in the fresh air, you can also move part of your party outdoors – as long as you have a garden or terrace available.
Ideal for this: a fire bowl over which a kettle of fragrant punch bubbles away. You can, for example, cook potatoes in aluminum foil in the embers and grill pieces of meat, corn on the cob, etc. on skewers. Marshmallows can then be roasted for a sweet finish.
New Year’s Eve at home as a couple – what can you do?
Making plans for the new year
To create a positive atmosphere at a New Year’s Eve at home for two, it helps to look forward to upcoming events together, such as the first concert together in the new year or the next trip or vacation.
Photo show
But a look back at the old year can also lift the mood – for example, at a New Year’s Eve at home for two, both guests could take at least five photos from the last 364 days. The most embarrassing, the funniest and the most beautiful photo are each awarded a marzipan pig in gold (paper).
Movie night
A home movie night may not be particularly original, but it’s cozy and just the thing for a cuddly, relaxed and cheerful evening.
“Love Actually” from 2003 with Hugh Grant, Emma Thompson, Liam Neeson and many other stars is one of the best romantic comedies and is actually a “Christmas movie” – but who has the time and inclination to watch TV on Christmas Eve? So we recommend this delicious episodic movie as a post-Christmas cinematic treat.
For the nostalgic, the classic “Die Feuerzangenbowle” in the original from 1944 with Heinz Rühmann in black and white or in color from 1970 with Uschi Glas and Walter Giller is recommended for New Year’s Eve for two at home.
And if you prefer an exciting puzzle movie to guess along with or scare you, you can find our selection of the best escape room movies here.
New Year’s breakfast
To start the new year in a dignified manner, the first meal on January 1st should also be a small feast.
A classic: champagne breakfast in bed with caviar and smoked fish on buttered toast, accompanied by the Vienna Philharmonic Orchestra’s New Year’s Concert.
Trying your hand at haute cuisine together can not only be a lot of fun on a New Year’s Eve at home for two, but can also be crowned with unexpected culinary success.
Traditionally, multi-course New Year’s Eve menus tend to be heavy on fish, but it’s best to create a candlelit dinner to suit your taste. You’ll find a vast array of ideas on the endless expanses of the internet.
A classically exquisite New Year’s Eve menu could start with a lobster soup, for example, followed by tuna tartare on avocado puree with horseradish and seerogen caviar. A shrimp cocktail is recommended as an intermediate course, followed by either fish in a salt crust, pork medallions, fillet of beef or duck. For dessert, get the Bunsen burner out of the garage and conjure up a formidable crème brûlée – the perfect way to start the New Year with a culinary treat of your own!
Wellness evening
A relaxing wellness evening makes for a particularly romantic New Year’s Eve at home for two.
After a walk in the fresh air or an enjoyable candlelit dinner, switch off all electric light sources and illuminate your home with candles only – preferably with lots of tea lights and a few scented candles.
If you have a bathtub, you can prepare a bubble bath at the right temperature, place the champagne bucket with ice next to the tub and toast the New Year with champagne or sparkling wine in the warm water.
New Year’s Eve at home without fireworks – environmentally friendly alternatives
So that toddlers, rabbits, dogs and cats are not unnecessarily frightened and the clear New Year’s Eve air stays that way, you should avoid loud fireworks at home on New Year’s Eve and make do with sparklers and sparklers. If you have the opportunity to celebrate outdoors, gather around a fire basket with a warming mulled wine and pop a single champagne cork at the stroke of midnight.
If you don’t want to miss out on a little action, you should try a sabrage, i.e. opening with a champagne sabre – please make sure you film it, it will be THE New Year’s Eve movie for the next annual review! 😎 You can see what this can look like in this entertaining recording.
PS: By the way, it is advisable to remove the wire before sabrage …
Conclusion: New Year’s Eve at home or away?
You see – celebrating New Year’s Eve at home as a couple or with friends and family is actually much more comfortable and fun than dancing the night away with complete strangers in a noisy entertainment venue and putting unnecessary strain on your eardrums and bank account!
