The Bookworm's New Year's Eve Party

1 gallon Apple Cider
1 bag of cinnamon candies (sometimes known as Red Hots)

Simmer apple cider on stove, adding the red hot candies and stirring until they are melted. Keep burner on low heat or remove cider to a crockpot to keep warm. Serve hot.

Baptist Wine (nonalcoholic)
Combine ginger ale with white grape juice, about half and half.

Snacks:
Cheese Moons

1 3/4 cups grated cheddar cheese (I prefer sharp)
1 cup flour (I prefer freshly ground whole wheat)
five tablespoons margerine or butter (butter is better)
cinnamon

Preheat oven to 400 degrees F.
Grease and lightly dust with flour a cookie sheet.
Grate cheese. Slice the butter in several small pieces.

Food Processor directions: Put grated cheese, diced butter, and flour in a food processor that has blades down in the bowl of the processor. Process with the metal blade for about 30 seconds, until a fairly smooth dough is formed.

No Food Processor directions: Grate the cheese and allow it to sit at room temperature, getting somewhat soft. Put the flour and butter in a bowl. Cut the butter into the flour as for biscuits or pie crust (i.e. use a pastry cutter, or take the butter and flour up between your clean hands and rub it between your hands, allowing the butter coated flour particles to fall down into the bowl, scoop up a good sized handful of flour and butter and repeat until the fat is thoroughly mixed in with the flour. Add the cheese and mix will with a fork, then squeeze it into dough using your hands.

Dust your hands lightly with flour. For each cookie take about two tablespoons of dough and form into a patty about 1/8th inch thick. Cut with a crescent moon shaped cookie cutter (or cut into crecents with a knife, or use a round cookie cutter and then cut the round moon into a crescent- or have full moons).

Place each moon on the cookie sheet. Create many moons this way, using up all the dough. Dust each moon with cinnamon (or sprinkle with a cinnamon and sugar mixture) and bake for about 10 minutes, or until lightly brown at the tips of the crescent . Let cool on a sheet. Award one point to each guest who can think of a literary tie in (possible answers: Glimpses of the Moon by Edith Wharton, The Cow Jumped Over the Moon, the poem Lady Moon, Lady Moon, the children's picture book Goodnight Moon...)

Popcorn-
Put oil in the bottom of a heavy duty sauce pan just deeply enough to come to the level of a kernel of popping corn. Put two or three kernels in the pan and put it on the stove on medium high to high heat. Cover.
When the kernels pop, pour in enough kernels to make a single layer of kernels, with enough space between kernels that when you give the pan a shake, the kernels have some 'elbow room.' Return the covered pan to the stove top, shaking a bit from time to time. Popcorn is done when there has been about three seconds between the last couple of pops.

Pour into a bowl, salt to taste.

Or don't salt it, but use it in this recipe for Microwave Caramel Corn
* 1 C. brown sugar
* 1 C. Margarine or butter
* 1 C. Dark Corn syprup (or a little less than a cup of honey)
* 1 tsp vanilla
* 1/2 tsp Baking soda
* 4 quarts popped popcorn

- Bring the sugar, margarine and corn syrup to a boil in a microwave safe bowl, about one minute on High. Cook one minute longer. Mix in vanilla and baking soda.
Pour the mixture over the popcorn and mix. Place the coated popcorn in a large paper bag. Microwave four minutes, shaking the bag each minute.
Eat immediately [our family's favorite option] or spread on wax paper to cool for eating later.

Games
The following games and activities are best played by those who have their wits about them, which is why they make good games for a anonalcoholic New Years Eve party.

For prizes have available a collection of books, or book related items. Use your imagination to find connections between well known books and items you might have around the house or can find at a dollar store. Be silly if you like. Some ideas:
a small jar of honey labeled "Pooh's honey pot,"
a pair of mittens (or a single one as a bit of a joke) for the story of the mitten by Jan Brett,
a small ball labeled 'The Netherfield Ball' (Jane Austen's Pride and Prejudice)
A blank book for The Diary of Anne Frank
A package of mushrooms for The Hobbit
A violin (the one I have in mind is a Christmas tree ornament) to represent Pa's Fiddle from Little House on the Prairie.

Award points by using Monopoly money or poker chips,
Games to play

Oral Authors Challenge:

The group sits in a circle and turns rotate around the circle. A player stands up and says the title of a well-known book. The first player to call out the author of that book gets a point, and without wasting any time, the player seated to the right of the first player calls out the title of another book. Play continues at least once around the circle.

Written Author's Challenge:
Give each player a pencil and two slips of paper.

Ask the players to write the name of a famous author on one slip of paper. Put these into a hat (The Mad Hatter's Hat) or a bowl (the bowl from Goldilocks and The Three Bears).

The host or hostess draws out a slip of paper, reads off the name of the author, and all players then have one minute to write down the title of a book by that author and the name of a character in the book. Once all the papers have been drawn, compare answers, crossing out any duplicates. Points are awarded to the player with the most unique, but still accurate, answers.

Pen, which requires no equipment except a single pen, a single die, and a piece of paper for each player. The more players the better. You definitely need more than two. You sit around a table (or stand). Players with long hair should pull back their hair in a pony tail if they don't want to find their hair getting tangled in the pen during vigorous play.
Players take turns rolling the die, all around the table, one player after the other, fairly quickly. As soon as any player rolls a 1 or a 6, that player grabs the pen and starts writing numbers backward, from 100 to 0 as fast as possible. You need to be fast because the other players are continuing to roll the die, and as soon as one of them rolls a 1 or a 6, that player will snatch the pen and try to write his own list of numbers from 100 down to 0.

We 'handicap' younger players. The very, very young only have to write from 1-10. As they get better at this, we add more numbers. Soon we switch to writing backward, maybe first from 10 to 1, then 20 to 1, then 50, and so on.

Boardless Scrabble-We buy up old scrabble games at thrift shops and yard sales and we toss the boards. All the pieces go face down in the center of the table. Players grab seven pieces and form a small scrabble arrangement in front of them, trying to use all their tiles. As soon as one player has used all seven tiles, that player yells, "GO!" and everybody has to grab another tile, whether or not they have used their seven yet. Often you will have two or three people yelling go at once, and then you have to grab a tile for each of them. You keep trying to build words and crossword puzzle-like arrangements of your tiles. You can rearrange them as you like. The game ends when the last tile from the center of the table is taken and the first player to use up all his tiles is the winner. You keep score by adding up the tile points the same way you do in regular scrabble (use a tile twice in two different words and you count it twice.
You don't have to keep score- you can just admire one another's words, and give one token to the player who completely used his or her tiles first.

Killer; a fun game for those who love the mystery genre. You sit in a circle and deal out a card, face down, to each person. Each player should look at his or her own card, and only his or her own card.

The one who gets the Ace of Spades is the killer (obviously you count out just enough cards for players, making sure the Ace is in the pile). He 'kills' people by winking at them. A few moments after they have been winked at, they die as dramaticially as they like. Other players try to guess who the killer is and reveal his name before they get winked at. To do this another player must state, "I have an accusation. Joe is the killer." If Joe is not the killer, the accuser dies.

Dictonary: You need a dictionary for the group and then each player needs index cards or pages from a small notebook, and a pen or pencil.
Play goes in a circle. First player chooses an obscure word from the dictionary and tells the other players the word. All the other players make up a definititon for that word and write it down.
The player who chose the word writes down the actual definition, and then collects the other definitions and reads them all aloud (including the real one). Players each state which definition they believe to be the real one.

Play then continues around the circle, the next player taking the dictionary and selecting an obscure word.

Scoring is as follows:
Each player gets one point for guessing the real definition.
Each player who writes a definition cunning enough to fool the other players into thinking it's the genuine definition gets one point for each person who selected his or her definition.

Play ends when each player has gotten to play at least once.

New Year's Resolutions:
Provide each player with pencil and paper, and then draw ten scrabble tiles. Read off the letters so everybody can copy them down. Now the guests must write down a ten word New Year's resolution, each word beginning with one of the letters chosen in the order the letters were chosen. Read them aloud.

At midnight, of course, ring in the New Year by banging on pots and pans, whistling, shouting, and in general making as much noise as possible.