Hello, lovely steemians!
New year is here, and with it comes New Year’s celebration. 
So, how do I usually spend my New Year’s Eve? Typically, I celebrate with my friends. The celebration we have is not typical or traditional celebration in my country (Slovakia). But it’s traditional for us - we spend every year doing the same things and we love spending time together this way.
Basically, what we do is, we meet to play board games and eat food. Together we decide what we want to eat, and then a selected group goes for a shopping trip to the supermarket to get all the ingredients for meals we’re going to cook. Then everything is brought to the house we’re meeting in. One of the challenges usually is, how to fit everything that needs to be refrigerated into refrigerator. Refrigerators here are not as big as it is common in North America, and there is already some leftover food (usually cakes) from Christmas as well as regular stuff, so we play fridge Tetris for a while. The fridge Tetris happens several time during our stay, every time we make something new that needs to be refrigerated. Usually we meet couple of days before New Year’s Eve, so the celebration is long and we need a lot of food. One of the meals we have are hamburgers made from scratch, with homemade buns and everything (courtesy of my wonderful partner).
A staple dish, that can’t be missing at any celebration is a potato salad. It’s made with potatoes, that have been boiled whole, then peeled and cut into tiny pieces, and mayo and other ingredients. Those other ingredients differ from household to household and everyone believes their potato salad is the best potato salad. In our family, we use canned carrots and pea mix, sometimes boiled eggs diced finely and occasionally canned corn. It is typically served with wiener schnitzel, but this time we had grilled chicken drumsticks.
And when we’re not eating or preparing food, we play board games. In between us, we managed to accumulate an impressive collection and lately we don’t have enough time to play everything, so we stick to our favourites. I took pictures of some games we played.
Galaxy Trucker
Dixit
The Reckoners
We spend several days like that, happily enjoying board games and too large quantities of great food. When The Midnight strikes, we toast to the New Year with sparkling wine and then go outside to watch fireworks. This year we were old and lazy, and didn’t actually go out, just opened the window to watch fireworks, but the experience was no less interesting.
Afterwards, we play more games, go to sleep, then spend another day or two playing games and eating food, while people start trickling out and leaving our happy little bubble to join their regular lives.
How about you? How do you celebrate the arrival of the year?
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