New Year’s Eve Story for Kids
New Year’s Eve is a hard bedtime because the whole evening is about staying up. Everyone is talking about midnight, there may be fireworks outside, and a small child has been told, reasonably, that they will be asleep long before it happens. A good New Year’s Eve story for kids doesn’t pretend the night is ordinary. It gives the child their own small way to mark it, early, and then lets them go to sleep without feeling they are missing out.
Here is a complete New Year’s Eve story to read aloud tonight, free. If fireworks bother your child, it is also a gentle way to say what the bangs are before they start. To make one starring your child, by name, it takes about thirty seconds.
Juno’s Early Midnight
A free story to read aloud tonight
Everybody kept saying the word midnight. Midnight was when the year would change. Midnight was when the fireworks would start. Midnight, Juno knew, was a very long way past bedtime.
“Then we’ll have our own midnight,” said Mom, “at seven o’clock.” She set the kitchen timer, and they sat on the rug with two cups of warm milk and counted down the last ten seconds together. Ten, nine, eight...
At zero they banged two saucepan lids, once, and shouted “Happy New Year!” at the cat, who did not seem to mind which year it was.
Then Mom told Juno about the fireworks. “Later, when you’re asleep, there might be bangs and pops outside. That’s just people saying hello to the new year. It isn’t anything coming in, and it stops.”
Juno drew one thing she liked about this year on a piece of paper, which was the paddling pool, and one thing she wanted next year, which was a bigger paddling pool. They put the paper in the jar on the windowsill.
Then it was the ordinary bedtime: teeth, pajamas, one book. And Juno fell asleep in this year, and woke up in the next one, and it looked exactly like her room.
Should I let my child stay up until midnight?
That is a family call, and plenty of families do it once in a while. If you don’t, an early countdown at the usual bedtime gives a young child the moment without the overtired morning after.
My child is scared of fireworks. What helps?
Saying what will happen before it happens tends to help: when the bangs might start, what they are, and that they stop. Some children sleep better with a fan or white noise on that night. If loud noises are a wider worry, there is also a free social story about loud noises on this site.