In honor of Harry Potter’s birthday next Monday, I thought I’d relive some of my favorite Harry Potter memories. Growing up, Harry Potter was THE THING – not just for my sisters and I, but my whole family. The whole world. There is something beautiful about groups of people waiting in lines at bookstores in the middle of the night to buy a book. Not the newest phone or gaming system, but a book.
Here are my favorite Harry Potter memories, in no particular order.
- Midnight Book Releases. We would dress up in costume and hang out in bookstores until 12:01 when they would sell us the first copies of the newest book. I think we did this three or four times.
- Harry Potter Parties. We have had a few of these over the years, and not just for birthdays. We’ll decorate the house to look like the Great Hall and play Quidditch in the yard. I love crafting and always had so much fun making decorations and re-creating the magical candies and treats.
- The Movies. We’d go to see the movies in theatre and then spend hours dissecting them in comparison to the books. We enjoyed the movies, but to hear us point out every single flaw, you’d think we thought they were the worst thing ever.
- Playing Harry Potter. My sisters and I would play Hogwarts like other kids play house, dressing in costume and attending classes. We created our own magical textbooks, wands, the whole shebang.
My absolute favorite memory comes from after the midnight book releases. On the way home from the bookstore, we always ended up stopping at the grocery store for something we had forgotten on grocery day. So there we’d be at one in the morning, traipsing through the grocery store in full costume. Delightful 😊
What are your favorite Harry Potter memories?
Kayla Bain-Vrba 
Ahhhh this is so cute!!!! I’m only 18 so I never got to grow up with the series like this so I’m very jealous!!!!
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Thanks! I’m waiting for that next big thing that’s going to make me lose my mind over. Fingers crossed it gets here soon! 🙂
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I was born the year Harry Potter was released in the US and it has truly shaped my life! I grew up with my older sisters going to all of the midnight releases, which I sadly never got to go to, but that’s not to say I wasn’t involved! I spent a lot of time helping make costumes for the midnight releases, including the memorable time when my dad went as Sirius Black, and I had to throw his prison outfit in the dirt and essentially try to make it look as dirty and old as I could! I can’t even remember the many times we had Harry Potter parties or dressed up as the characters or played Hogwarts. My favorite memories would have to be of reading the books. I’m the type of person, who I can read the entire series in a week and have memorized pages of the books, but I loved when my family read them together. We would all cuddle up in the living room, as my mom would pull out the book and read out a chapter or two (maybe more if we begged), before putting it away and forcing us to wait until the next day to read it again. My mom has the best reading voice, and I always remember her reading the books to us with a smile!
“Words are, in my not-so-humble opinion, our most inexhaustible source of magic.”
-Albus Dumbledore, Harry Potter and the Philosopher’s Stone
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