How is New Year's magic created? Well, you gather the world's best kids, the world's best staff and absolutely wonderful friends to celebrate New Year's Eve.
You have a large family where everyone is helping out with the preparations.
You let the older children arrange and hold all games and competitions. You have the world's best Miaoo and Porn in the kitchen who, together with the children and staff, arrange a wonderful New Year's buffet. And last but not least, you have fantastic friends who want to come and celebrate with us. Then New Year's magic is created!
Our celebration started already in the morning with all the preparations and then the partying continued uninterrupted until you could not take it anymore.
At 14.00 our games and competitions started and they were many and fun thanks to our older children's fantastic imagination and ingenuity.
It was a short break for ice cream but then it just continued with even more crazy and fun games. And everyone wanted to join, children as well as adults.
At six o'clock it was time for this year's New Year's buffet and guess if we ate - everyone had worked up a real hunger with all the games and the food was, as always, wonderfully delicious.
You would think that dinner would calm down the party, but no! With new energy after dinner, the fun started again.
We celebrated the children who had had their birthday in the last 6 months and the traditional New Year's gift lottery was launched. After that, the children held a crazy fashion show and after the fashion show, the children had arranged a very difficult Thai version of the Mexican Pinatan. A Mexican Pinata is made of papier mache’, our Thai variant was made of a cardboard box well sealed with strong brown tape - so they really had to work hard to get it down. But of course they succeeded.
After the conquest of Pinatan, it was already 10.30 pm and some of us started to get tired, but far from all. Poker, Klara, Vera, Douglas and Agnes went home after Pinatan and then it was our turn to give up. But rumours has it that some of our children celebrated all night long - they continued with kareokee, dancing, and watching movies.
I wish it was possible to transfer the feeling and the atmosphere but is unfortunately impossible. Neither pictures nor words can do them justice, because after all, it is not the content that determines whether New Year's magic is created - it is the people.
I am so incredibly grateful and proud of our fantastic kids - how they help each other, take care of each other and how everyone can and wants to be a part of the fun.
I am just as grateful and proud of our amazing staff who give our children the opportunity to develop into these kind, generous, welcoming, open, helpful, wonderfully crazy individuals, each with their very own personality.
I am so grateful that our Owen was finally able to return to his Thai family and celebrate New Year with us, that Lasse and parts of his family were finally able to return to us and that Poker and Klara and their children Vera, Douglas and Agnes had the opportunity to come and celebrate New Year with us.
I am grateful that I got to experience the integration between our children and Vera, Douglas and Agnes.
To see how our children welcome them to the family, and how Vera, Douglas and Agnes choose to be a part, even if they do not always understand everything.
To see our teenagers' curiosity about Vera and Douglas and their curiosity about our children. How they find a way to communicate even though many of our children are a little embarrassed when it comes to speaking English.
To see how Agnes and Faa, who are of the same age, find each other without having a common language - or perhaps because they actually have a common language, even though it does not necessarily have to be English, Swedish or Thai.
It is there, right there, with all these wonderful people that magic is created and together we had the opportunity to end 2021 with the hope of an even better 2022.
We missed a lot of our friends, but we are convinced that we will see each other again soon.
A really Happy New 2022!