When the weather becomes cold enough to require sweaters, it is time to get cozy and curl up with warm drinks, warm clothes, and the warm company of those that you care about. The last thing you are typically thinking about is running outside in a blizzard to go socialize in bars and restaurants.
Make the most out of winter by finding ways to satisfy your social desires by bringing the party to your place instead of braving the brutal elements outside. There are plenty of ways to keep your social calendar populated this winter without even having to step foot out of your front door to do so.
Take notice of these five ways to have some domestic fun with your favorite people and make some new memories happen with family and friends this winter season.
1. Have a Listening Party
If the weather is just too unbearable to travel around to the homes of your family or closest friends, you can have a proper social gathering online by setting up the date and time for an online music-listening party with you as the DJ.
Let’s say that you have five other people locked in to join this virtual jam that you really have a lot of love for. What you can do is pick 10 of their favorite songs for a total of 50. Now once you merge those 50 songs with ten of your own favorite songs, you have a personalized playlist of 60 tracks, and at roughly three minutes each, you now have three hours of music to cover the length of a decent digital get-together.
Put these 60 curated songs into a specially customized playlist on a streaming platform such as Spotify, where you can host this listening party directly from the platform. The next step is that as a Spotify Premium member, all you have to do is simply share a link to your musical list with each of those friends joining your party, and you will be able to salute them all with their favorite tunes that night.
2. Talk on the Phone
Year after year, it seems that people get more and more comfortable with just texting each other instead of taking the time to hear each other’s voices and hold a traditional conversation on the telephone. This winter, when you are more of a homebody because of the snowy weather, take advantage of this hibernation period and get back to calling people on the phone more.
It is a great way to snap out of video fatigue. Now you don’t have to put on a decent outfit or set up a proper lighting situation. Just talk until either one of you either gets tired or has to tend to hang up and tend to something else.
Another awesome element of talking on the phone is that you can multitask while you are doing it. Maybe you can work on getting some laundry done or walk around the house for some extra exercise instead of being confined to sitting in front of a computer screen and staring at each other for an hour or two.
3.Virtual Games
Playing games to play on Facetime, such as an interactive game of charades, is a fun method to get you and your loved ones to move around and keep your bodies warm this winter. For younger children, Charades is a family favorite that reinforces non-verbal communication, vocabulary words, reading abilities, and being able.
When everyone is ready to play, have a list of words pop up on the players’ screen, then act it out without saying the word out loud to see if the person’s [artmer can guess it correctly.
There are many other FaceTime games that you can play online such as Scattergories, Scrabble, Boggle, and Pictionary. They can promote social, emotional, and academic learning and build better bonds with family members that live far away that you don’t get to visit very often.
4. Host a Dinner
If you are someone that prefers to be more of a homebody when the winter sets in, why not bring the idea of “dinner with friends” directly to your dining room? You should host dinners this winter to feed those that you love and won’t get to see very often until the weather gets better. You can plan the meals around particular cultural foods or simply make some choices and have people vote on them beforehand.
5. Movie Night
Last but not least, in order to maintain a healthy social calendar during the colder months without leaving your home, plan movie nights during the winter. Get a group of film fanatics together and rotate nights where each of you can pick the movie of the evening. Use an online digital tool to help you all synchronize the movie that you are streaming so that you are all watching it at the same time and have yourself some laughs and debates about it.
