So party planning was something I used to love doing when I was a kid. I would save up my money from my bus cleaning job (age 10) or my paper route (age 12) and I would spend months thinking about how I could make it super fun for me and my friends. I bought the food, planned the games, rented the move, etc.
After heading to college, I stopped planning parties. I have an inkling as to why, but that's not important. I did plan my kid's birthday parties each year, and make some very cool cakes as well, but that was the extent of it.
Then one year, when my son was about six or seven, we were finally able to introduce him to the first three Harry Potter movies without him having nightmares. So, in order to make it extra fun, my husband and I whipped up a batch of butter beer, I tracked down some Berti Bott’s Every Flavor Beans, and we started the tradition of an annual Harry Potter Movie Marathon each summer right before school started.
From then on, I had this secret desire to one day really go all out and plan and then throw a truly epic Harry Potter party for more than just our family. The idea of taking such an event on was both terrifying and euphoric to me. But I felt that old party planner in me begin to stir and eventually crawl her way out of the black abyss she’d fallen into.
Well, in 2015, just after my daughter was born, we moved from our condo community, into a house with a yard, and the kind of neighborhood you want to put roots down in and stay a long while. Thankfully, we were blessed to have a mass of truly incredible neighbors settle into the neighborhood as well.
That was when I knew the Clark’s Annual Back-to-School Harry Potter Party had to happen. And soon! Thankfully, we moved into our neighborhood in October, and so I had a little less than an entire year to prepare myself for it.
In August 2016, we held our first annual HP party! And it was a pretty big hit. Since then, our party has grown along with our neighborhood, and it is one of, if not the most creative time of year for me.
Well, this past week was our third Annual Back-to-School Harry Potter Party, and Wow! What a week we’ve had! Each year for our party, we’ve focused on one of the HP books in the series for our party theme. We started with Sorcerer’s Stone in 2016, so this year we were on Book 3, the Prisoner of Azkaban. Here are a few pictures of our last two Harry Potter parties just to give you an idea of the lengths we go to in order to make our HP parties particularly memorable and fun for the kids (no matter their age;-)).
As you can see, the party has grown each year.
Anyway, from about a day or two after our party last year (which was awesome, btw!) I’ve been thinking about this year’s party. Ideas have been cooking for about a year now, and when the time came to execute those ideas, I went into this kind of creative mania and I couldn’t stop until I finally actualized every idea that had accumulated. I was so relieved when it all came together better than I hoped it would. ;-)
Thankfully, I had the presence of mind during my creatively manic episode to film a lot of those ideas coming into existence. I’m thrilled to be able to share several tutorials with you on my YouTube channel. Check them out here: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCUr1BY2_imuXrmOH4KqoOIQ?view_as=subscriber
Below is a video of all the party highlights. I hope very much that you enjoy them, and that they inspire you to get particularly creative in your own party planning celebrations.
Lots of Love,
Hannie