Harry Potter Birthday Party

At last! The day I have been planning for almost eight years has finally come! I finally got to throw a Harry Potter party!

The first thing I did was promise my husband I wouldn’t go overboard. The second thing I did was immediately go overboard. Come on, I mean it will be at least a few years before I get to throw another one, right? I’ve only just started reading the series to Ben.

We decided to have this party a few weeks early because Ellie’s cousins were visiting from Indiana and it’s been a while since they have been able to attend each other’s parties. Since it was still during the school year, I told her to go ahead and invite her class. Having a summer birthday, we usually only invite a few Girl Scout friends and some friends from camp. After narrowing down the list as much as possible, we wound up with a guest list of 36. ACK! So you can imagine I was thrilled that only 25 were able to come. 25 eight year olds in my house? Crazy you say?

Well, first let me tell you how the party went.

Invitations were sent out (via owl post, of course…. meaning I stamped the envelope with a rubber stamp image of an owl) informing students that they were invited, in honor of Ellie’s birthday, to attend Hogwarts School of Witchcraft and Wizardry for one day only. They were to arrive at Platform 9 3/4 (aka… my house) at 10:30am.

From 10:30-10:45 students received their wands.

(Stay tuned for a tutorial!) (Update- Here’s the tutorial!)

Since we all know that a wand chooses the wizard, and not the other way around, I had the students sit in a circle on the floor. I held up a wand and my very generous and helpful cousin spun a bowling pin in the middle of the circle. When it stopped, the student it was pointing at took the wand I was holding.

From 10:45 until about 10:50, the students were sorted into their houses. I purchased plastic rings with the house crests and a sorting hat from Amazon. I placed all of the rings into the sorting hat and each student picked one out of the hat. (We had a small “pest” outbreak earlier in the school year, so I chose NOT to have each student place the same hat on their heads… just in case.)

Now that each student had a wand and a house, they gathered around the dessert table where Ellie led them in a round of the Hogwarts school song. Before the song, Ellie announced that Mr. Filch wanted the students to know that anyone caught waving their wand in another student’s face would have their wand removed until the end of the party. Sadly, Ben was the only one to have his wand removed. After the song, they proceeded to the dungeon  basement for potions and transfiguration classes.

I found this amazing site called madscience.org and they had a party package for “young wizards”. I called them, they were available, and I told them to take my money.

It was the best thing ever!

That right there, ladies and gentlemen, is 25 kids in my basement. Completely enthralled and hanging on their professor’s every word. (I almost wanted to call their muggle teacher and tell her how proud she should be!)

There was ice!

There was fire!

And during the demonstration where he showed the kids how to make fireworks different colors and then had to explain that he couldn’t make ACTUAL fireworks without setting my basement on fire, he politely resisted the chants of “do it! do it!”.

After classes, the students were dismissed to the dining room for pizza and cake.And cookies. The next planned activity was balloon Quidditch, but at this point I lost them. So I dismissed the students back to the dungeon to play with the birthday girl’s (and her brother’s) toys until their parents came to escort them back to the Hogwarts express. A few kids stayed to play Quidditch, but the snitch was quickly found and everyone was happy.

Along with the wands and rings, students took home an assortment of favors from Hogsmeade Village. They took home Chocolate Frogs (filled with Oreo truffle) and Bertie Botts Every Flavor Beans from Honeydukes. And an owl from Eeylops. (I KNOW, I KNOW Eeylops is in Diagon Alley, not Hogsmeade!)

 

 

Throughout the party, I asked the kids to make funny faces while I snapped pictures. I used the pictures to make thank you notes for Ellie.

I will have a tutorial for the wands soon. If you are interested in the boxes I used for the chocolate frogs and Bertie Botts Beans, I found templates through a Google search. I’m sorry I can’t share them, I’m sure I’m not supposed to. But with a little search, I know you’ll find what you’re looking for.

I hope the kids had as much fun as I did! And I hope you had fun reading about the party!

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