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The Order of Oddfish

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Halloween 2016: Harry Potter style!

November 2, 2016

Lucy and Ingrid are 7 and 5 years old and they’re enthralled with Harry Potter (of course). We’ve been reading our way aloud through the series, book by book, and I’m now reading Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix to them. Every year we have a Halloween party where all the neighborhood kids come, and this year Lucy wanted to be Hermione, so we thought we’d throw the party with a Harry Potter theme! (Ingrid preferred to dress up as Saorise, the selkie from the movie Song of the Sea, but she was still on board. She’s the one in the video who is sprawled out on the couch, too pooped to participate.)

You can check out Lucy’s guided tour in the video above. Unfortunately, once the party got underway, I was too distracted and sociable to take many pictures! (I was also helping to run the “haunted house” that we’d made in the basement, which started out as a cart ride through Gringotts, until an alarm got tripped, and the kids have to crawl through a tunnel to escape the vengeful goblins, which unfortunately led to an Azkaban swarming with dementors! Many children screamed that day.)

Who were Heather and I dressed as? Well, Professor Trelawney and Professor Snape, naturally. Oh, come on, somebody must have shipped these two! It’s not out of the question!

Have you seen these wizards? VERY DANGEROUS.

The thing that took the most work were the candles floating in midair. We made about twenty of them. More labor intensive than I expected, although they were nothing more than cardboard tubes with glue-gun dribbles down the sides to simulate melted wax, all painted white, with an electric mini-candle stuck in the top, hung from the ceiling with fishing line. Hat tip to Pins and Things for the idea!

Some wanted posters for Sirius Black and Bellatrix Lestrange. Speaking of Sirius Black, there’s his head in the fireplace, just like in books 3 and 4!

Here’s some Hogwarts students just hanging out in the stairwell. Not everyone was in-universe. Some upstart telekinetic girl from Stranger Things made an appearance as well.

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Unfortunately I don’t have pictures of all the other great costumes that night: the father-and-son Han Solos, the impeccable Mrs. Weasley, the Sirius Black, the Alexander Hamilton, Link and Zelda, and more! In any case, another champion Halloween. Already looking forward to next year!

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