A NEW YEAR’S EVE GUIDE TO STAYING AT HOME
Five celebratory strategies for the livingroom countdown crowd.
Couchbound countdown For the cable-equipped, flip between Carson Daly, with his The Voice costar Gwen Stefani and Her Royal Housewife NeNe Leakes on NBC (11:30 p.m.); Pitbull in Miami on Fox (8 p.m.) and long-suffering Anderson Cooper on CNN (8 p.m.), who should probably make a New Year’s resolution to not let Kathy Griffin co-host this with him again next year.
Sketchy comedy What do Jon Snow, Donald Trump and Jose Bautista have in common? If you said great hair you are reading this way too fast. They’re three of the ripe targets Air Farce takes on in their annual Air Farce New Year’s
Eve Special on CBC (8 p.m.). In the minutes before midnight, This Hour
Has 22 Minutes counts down their best sketches of the year (11:30 p.m.).
Rock, roll and Matt Damon Canadian networks have bowed out of throwing a CanCon-centric New Year’s Eve special this year: CTV is rerunning Adele Live in London ( 11:30 p.m.) and Global is broadcasting the 1997 Matt Damon chestnut Good
Will Hunting (11:30 p.m.), while City bids a “Seacrest Out!” to 2015 with Dick Clark’s Rockin’ New Year’s Eve with Ryan Seacrest 2016, featuring Luke Bryan, One Direction and Brampton breakout Alessia Cara.
Your resolution starts tomorrow New Year’s Eve may be one of the busiest takeout days of the year (an- other, surprisingly, is Valentine’s Day), but that traffic’s not necessarily fuelled by midnight snacking. Sixty per cent of orders happen before 6 p.m., with only 10 per cent occurring between 10 p.m. and midnight, according to Ross Hunter of JustEat.ca. “That’s when takeouts start to close down, so it can be harder to place an order,” he cautions. So try to order before 10 p.m. Chinese takeout makes up half of Just-Eat.ca’s New Year’s Eve orders, followed by Thai and Japanese. Traditional fast-food options, like the good ol’ pizza, are relatively less in demand on NYE, making it a good stealth option.
Big beautiful backgrounds The Yule Log is so last week, but there are plenty of next-to-nothing videos online to replicate its hypnotic atmosphere.
Chat with your NYE squad through three hours of bison grazing at Yellowstone (bit.ly/1MFpeIo), three hours of the tides flowing into a calming ocean cove in California (bit.ly/1N8zPhy), or 10 hours of Norway’s unlikely smash television event, a camera pointing out the window during a real-time train ride (bit.ly/1UfnHi0).
Phone it in Sync screens with your New Year’s crew for Fibbage. During the bluffing game, you scheme up the most convincing answer for a super obscure quiz question (“William Shatner raised $25,000 for Habitat for Humanity by selling his (blank)”). Everyone sees the question on your big screen (TV, laptop or tablet) and two to eight players answer in secret on their smartphones. The winner earns everyone’s mistrust. Available for $24.99 (U.S.) at the website jackboxgames.com through Xbox One, PS3, PS4, Steam, Amazon Fire TV, Android TV or the Mac App Store.
Everywhere at once Can’t wait for midnight? Sydney, Australia, celebrates New Year’s Eve at 8 a.m. in our time zone, with fireworks live-streaming at SydneyNewYearsEve.com. Catch every cracker on a 360-degree video version, to be posted in early January. The astonishingly decadent display at the Burj Khalifa skyscraper in Dubai follows at 3 p.m., live-streamed at TheNational UAE. And the group Periscope Rally has recruited 43 people to livestream New Year’s Eve around the world on Periscope. Users will tag their broadcasts #PeriNYE.