Three things to know about New Year's Eve confetti that falls in Times Square

Lisa Gutierrez, The Kansas City Star on Dec 31, 2025

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What would New Year’s Eve in Times Square be for the crowds there and people watching remotely without a couple of key ingredients? The glitzy ball and all ... that ... confetti.

There’s something quite magical, really, about millions of bits of colorful paper flying like snow through the air over a raucous rabble. So American of us, though an Italian man invented paper confetti.

It is so special, in fact, that there will be not one but two showers of confetti after midnight in Times Square on Thursday.

Here are three things to know about that New Year’s Eve confetti you can use to impress your friends in between the toasts.

The confetti is thrown by hand

A 71-year-old man named Treb Heining — aka the “confetti king” — leads an army of volunteers in throwing 3,000 pounds of confetti over the revelers in Times Square.

They start tossing in the last seconds before midnight, before the ball drops, when Heining yells the command into his walkie-talkie: “Go confetti! Go confetti! Go confetti!”

Then, largely unnoticed by the throngs smooching and singing “Auld Lang Syne,” 100-some volunteers stationed at seven buildings surrounding Times Square grab handfuls of colorful, biodegradable, flame-retardant, 2-inch squares of paper out of boxes and toss it off balconies and through open windows.

Watching, Heining cries every darn time.

He’s a longtime balloon guy by trade, having worked with Disney amusement parks for years. In 1991, the new planners of the iconic ball drop celebration in Times Square approached him for fresh ideas.

Why not throw confetti, he suggested. It had never been done.

He knew the massive blizzard effect he envisioned could not be achieved with confetti-blowing machines, the kind that blast confetti at sports celebrations and over the thousands of revelers gathered in the KC Live! Block, the city’s biggest New Year’s Eve celebration featuring a dozen parties at 12 venues.

In a recent documentary by New York filmmaker Joshua Charow, Heining said he didn’t tell anyone the first 12 years that the confetti was thrown by hand.

“I didn’t want to say. I kept it a secret,” he told Charow. “And it wasn’t until I did an interview in 2004. (Reporter) Brooks Barnes did a great piece and we were having dinner together and somehow it slipped out.

“I said, ‘Well, you know, we do it by hand.’ And Brooks looked at me and he put his pencil down and he said, ‘Treb, this is going to be a front page story in the Wall Street Journal.’ And I said, ‘Really?’”

By now, people from around the world, including Russia, Sweden and New Zealand, have participated as “dispersal volunteers.”

There are wishes written on the confetti

Some of those pieces of confetti have wishes written on them that people have sent in online or filled out at the New Year’s Eve Wishing Wall in Times Square.

Anyone can submit a wish to send into the heavens each year.

The New York Post reports that people have “wished” to fall in love, get skinny or even buy a new car.

Heining found an especially emotional message one year.

“I wish my mom’s cancer goes away,” it said, along with a phone number.

He and a volunteer called the number and Heining told the woman who answered that the message would take flight over Times Square that very night.

All he heard was a woman sobbing.

“The message thing is so, so amazing, because some of them are written by kids, and they’re really rudimentary, and other ones are very touching,” he told The Post.

“And it makes you realize, as a human being, how fortunate we all are, because so many people are carrying such a load.”

2026 brings two ball drops, patriotic confetti

There will be two ball drops this year, an extra one to honor the 250th anniversary in 2026 of when the Declaration of Independence was signed.

Learn this word: semiquincentennial.

The Times Square Alliance that organizes the annual New Year’s Eve ball drop has planned a “surprise” second ball drop shortly after the new year rolls in.

At about 12:04 a.m. Eastern on Thursday, the Times Square ball will be relit in red, white and blue and rise above illuminated “2026” numbers. And another flurry of confetti — this time 2,000 pounds in red, white and blue — will fall over the area.

Fireworks set to Ray Charles’ rendition of “America the Beautiful” will close the presentation, just the first of many events planned coast-to-coast.

This will mark the first time in history that the ball in Times Square drops for anything other than to bring in the new year.

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