Whenever Mallory (my best friend and business partner) and I plan something, whether it be a party or a trip, we have this mentality to go all out. This Halloween was no exception. Awhile back, we decided that we’d host a Hogwarts Halloween event at my house. Basically, a Harry Potter themed party! As I mentioned last week, we emailed out save-the-dates and a Hogwarts acceptance letter, which served as the official invitation. If we’d had more time and hadn’t booked ourselves for so much in such a short amount of time, we would’ve mailed paper invitations. (Because those are the best!)
If you aren’t familiar with Harry Potter, the movies or books, then none of this will make much sense to you. However, if you’re a total nerd (like we are) and love both the books and movies, then you’ll probably wish you’d been invited to our little shindig!
Upon our guests arrival, we sorted them into houses (or teams) by their character or their preference. Each guest that donned character costumes had name badges for the evening, with their house crest.
Along with crest badges (a.k.a. name tags), we printed out checklists for the guests to participate in the Horcrux Hunt. For non-Harry Potter fans, horcruxes are magical items Harry Potter must find to defeat his dark nemesis, Voldemort. The object of the game is for each guest to try to find the horcuxes we’d hidden around the house. Each horcrux is worth different points, which were tallied at the end of the night. Points went towards each team house.
Like I said, total nerds.
In the book series, Harry Potter and his friends enjoy snacking on chocolate frogs. Courtesy of my sister, who slaved away for hours, we had chocolate frogs for our guests to enjoy. Unlike in the books, our chocolate frogs couldn’t hop away!
Above is the scoreboard used for tallying each house’s points. Team Hufflepuff took home the House Cup!
Each house (Gryffindor, Ravenclaw, Hufflepuff, and Slytherin) were represented with pennant banners of each house crest and displayed in the kitchen. These, along with the printed character photos, were probably a favorite detail of mine.
It wouldn’t be a Hogwarts Halloween without Butterbeer and Pumpkin Juice – both are Harry’s favorites. These concoctions were firsts for me, and I can attest that both were delicious!
In addition to the classic drinks, we handmade wands for all of our guests. (At least those that didn’t bring their own.) As the story goes, each young wizard must visit Ollivander’s Wand Shoppe to meet their wand. According to Mr. Ollivander, “The wand chooses the wizard or witch, that much has always been certain.”
For the enjoyment of our guests and to help document our evening, we set up a DIY version of a photo booth with homemade props. I can’t wait to share the awesome pictures that were snapped in this rigged booth!
Later this week, I’ll provide a few DIY tutorials, snapshots from the photo booth, and the recipes we used for the Butterbeer and Pumpkin Juice.
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