Most people have some sort of New Year's tradition they do on Dec 31/Jan 1.  Some play board games, have a party and review the year past, while others look to the year ahead, plan and anticipate.
We do both while looking at the Injury Log collected over the past year and then create an Appreciation Board listing things we want more of in the coming year.

Injury Log:
All of our 4 kids are on the adventurous side, even back when we lived in the US.
To illustrate my point, here the short list of injuries we're had over the past years:

1 pitchfork through the foot
5 split open heads, 3 of which required stiches
9 fractures, 3 of which required serious treatment
1 one inch long cut through the middle of the tongue
3 drills or nails through a finger
countless bloody noses and goose eggs...

Couple this klumsiness with a natural inclination to "show off" (there are 4 constantly competing for attention after all) and mix in my constant documenting of our lives through pictures, and you come up with the first of our annual, New Year's Eve traditions - the review of the "Injury Log".


While taking pics of your hurt kids may seem macabre, it's proven to be an excellent way to diffuse a tense situation and figure out exactly how hurt the child is.  Thank goodness, this year was very light on the injuries with only 3 fractures, 1 drill through the finger and bloody noses etc.
Also, note the absence of pictures of serious injuries, as those are of course handled by our friendly neighbourhood doctor/hospital, without a camera.

The premise of the Injury Log is to reduce the injuries in the coming year by learning how to avoid breaking your _____(fill in the blank with arm/toe/finger) or how to safely use tools, something which I am still working on. 
It is quite funny though, when one of the kids comes running to me while bleeding, insisting that I take a pic before wiping the blood


Appreciation Board:
After laughing about the crazy injuries of the year, we make some sort of appreciation board/garland/picture where each person in the family writes or draws things they loved over the past year, which then gets arranged in some bigger collage, looping garland or similar.  This is the first year the girls can write, so we each got strips of paper and wrote some of our favorite things about the past year and then taped them together in a collage.

 
The premise of the appreciation board is to celebrate and appreciate our favorite things in life (note the "not being sick" in the above pic) so those can multiply over the coming year. It also makes for a low budget wall decoration and constant reminder of what we have to be thankful for.

Happy New Year to you all, may you be healthy and injury free in 2009, while having so many wonderful moments and things in your life to fill an entire wall!