A Bright Spot in Our New Years Eve Celebration

Christmas seemed to come and go really fast this year.  I suppose it’s because of Thanksgiving being so late.  The last couple of days, our family has been relishing in the fun of playing with all our kids’ toys and my husband and I have been enjoying time off from work.  To think about the impending New Year, makes my heart skip a beat.  Time just rolls by way too fast.  If only we could slow down time.

Nonetheless, we have decided to host a New Years Eve celebration at our house this year and it’s time to begin planning for the next event.  We have all of our Christmas decorations up…I try to keep them up as long as possible to make the season last longer.  So the house looks great, minus toys and cookie crumbs everywhere!

We plan on having families come over for the party, so I anticipate, we’ll do the Times Square Ball Drop celebration twice, since we are on the West Coast.  Once at 9 pm to celebrate with our Eastern friends and to celebrate with our kids when they are the most awake, then again at midnight to celebrate West Coast style.

With all of the Christmas lights we already have around the house and outside, I’ve been trying to figure out what we could do to add something new to the mix that would highlight New Years Eve.  I thought of adding a disco ball, but a real one is too expensive.  We even have a toy disco ball, but it’s not as powerful as I wanted and besides, it projects in color, and I was looking for something more enchanting.

I visited Walmart to see if by chance I could find just the right item, preferably something techy.  To my delight, I found a metal outdoor LED 10 inch sphere for $19.98.  I love its silver reflective color and it has 48 LED lights scattered throughout the ball for that extra glitz.  The LED lights have a warm glow to them, not the typical bright white look.  The packaging says that these lights use 80% less energy than traditional lights, which hopefully means they are less taxing on the batteries and last a long time.  It also states that if one light burns out, the rest will stay lit.  Yay!  Gotta love today’s technology!

Luckily, the LED sphere comes with a with a 12 inch cord and battery pack, so you don’t need to worry about plugging it in an outlet…perfect for hanging it from the fan in our family room.  To my surprise, the battery pack takes 6 AA batteries, that’s a lot of power for a lightweight LED globe.  I affixed it to my ceiling fan light and it looks beautiful.  After I got down, I was very happy with it but began to think, it’s too bad the sphere didn’t come with a remote control.  I’ll have to get a chair to turn it on and then a chair to turn it off each time.

I was relieved when I looked at the packaging a little more closely.  There is a built in timer in the battery pack that turns the ball on for six hours and then turns itself off for 18 hours!  How cool is that?  Now I see why it needs the extra batteries, to manage the time.  In addition to the time, when you turn the sphere on, you can choose from 3 settings:

1. Steady On – the lights are always on for 6 hrs.
2. Flash – the lights flash on and off
3. Phasing – the lights gradually turn on and then gradually turn off

I think I’ll choose the Phasing setting for New Years Eve celebration and I’ll turn it on at 7 pm so it will last through the night, at least until 1pm.   The techie in me delights in things like this.  I remember as a child, there were few lighting options for decorating  for Christmas.  We didn’t have the blower lawn decorations, our lights would turn off one light burned out, and our timers were a bit antiquated.  Today’s decorations, well, at least some of them, have built-in timers…there’s less thinking and more enjoying.

I’m looking forward to New Years Eve and saying goodbye to 2013 and eyeing 2014 with great anticipation.  And there’s no better way to do it than surround myself with those I love and friends I hold so dear.

No matter what you’re doing this New Years Eve, whether it’s throwing a party, going to a party elsewhere, or enjoying the peace and quiet of home, we wish you a bright New Years Eve celebration and a wonderful 2014!