It's an ideal time to celebrate connectedness, reflect on the past year, and look ahead to the future. For us, deciding what treats to purchase, shopping together, and decorating occupy much of the day. Dinner and card games fill the early evening. When interest in games dies down, we assemble in the living room, sit in a circle, and begin the most meaningful part of our New Year's Eve together, Topic Talk. Topics are ideas we dream up to structure our conversation.
Listeners do simply that-listen until everyone has responded.
When each person has had an opportunity to respond to the topic, we ask questions and elaborate on our remarks. A list of goals were shared and recorded a year earlier and preserved in the Nostalgia Corner. Again, we take turns reading our goals from the preceding year and telling whether or not we reached them. Make the high school baseball team. After sharing in depth about how we achieved or didn't achieve goals, we set new ones for the upcoming year.