Monday, January 5, 2009

The New Year's Baby

Growing up, we had the New Year's Baby come to visit our house on New Year's Eve. Of course I realized that this was unique to our family and our cousins. It was something my mother had in her family growing up and she continued it with us. I have continued this with my children, and it is really a fun little family tradition. We put our shoes under the tree or on the table if the tree has been taken down. In the morning, we find fun things in our shoe (from the New Year's Baby) to welcome in the New Year. Usually we would find things like a new toothbrush, a pack of gum, a calendar, and a box of cereal- that was our own! Being that my children are very little, I just saved a few dollar store things- that would have been in their stockings- for the New Year Baby. As you can see, we have some plastic dinosaurs, playdough, and CandyLand (I bought for $2 a year ago). Not anything fancy, just something to make the New Year fun! The interesting thing is, my son has a bunch of these plastic dinosaurs (88 cents at Wal-mart) and when he got some new ones, he played with his dinosaurs for 2-3 days straight. (Isn't it interesting...it really doesn't take much to make young children happy...yet usually, as parents we go way overboard-when all it takes is a small toy on an ordinary day to please a child)
Happy New Year!

4 comments:

Michelle... said...

What a fun tradition.

Jodi said...

Sharla it's so strange that you would post this because Kent's family has the exact same tradition! I'd never heard of Baby New Year until Kent and I were engaged. But it's definitely fun to put out your shoe and see what Baby New Year left for you.

Anonymous said...

that is cute we put out a shoe for st nicholas on the eve of st nicholas day!

Cami said...

Very fun. We decided against doing the shoes for our kids. Kind of sad, but kind of a relief.