This is a big summer for Harry Potter fans. The Order of the Phoenix movie comes out on July 13th in regular theatres and in IMAX. The final book in the series, Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows will be released on July 21st. Since it’s such a big summer for Harry fans, I thought I’d share a few ideas for parties with a wizard theme.
A few years ago my oldest had a Harry Potter birthday party. Some of the kids wore costumes from Halloween, others wore t-shirts. For drinks, we had “potions”. We used a word processing program to make new names for sodas like Hagrid’s tea, butter beer, and pumpkin juice. I printed out the new labels and taped them to 2-liter sodas. The kids really had fun mixing up different flavor combinations, and topping their concoctions with pop rocks or sugar sprinkles.
My son decorated his own cake with a plastic figures of the movie characters.
For games, we had a guess the flavor of jelly beans contest. We called them Bertie Botts beans, but we used the tiny gourmet jelly beans that come in a lot of flavors. The kids kept thinking I was going to sneak in nasty flavors like dirt or ear wax. They had fun guessing the flavors and laughing about horrible ideas for other flavors. We also put together a trivia game with questions from books and off the internet. Some of the questions were easy, some were quite hard. I was surprised at how well the kids knew the books.
For decoration we taped a stuffed owl to the lamppost in our front yard. On one side of our front door we put a sign saying Platform 9, on the other side of the door we put another sign with Platform 10. We dug out some Halloween decorations too, things like pumpkins and bats.
None of these ideas are expensive. And even better, the kids can help with the decorating, and coming up with the soda names, and even designing the bottles. I like parties where the children do some of the planning and can help out with most everything.
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