Harry Potter Birthday Celebration Ideas

Author J.K. Rowling's world of Wizards and Witches not only makes great books and movies, but provides the makings for a great birthday party. You provide a few tasty treats, decorations, and fun activities reminiscent of the Harry Potter series and, like magic, children will fill in the rest with their imaginations.

Invitations

Type up a letter in an old-fashioned style font for each guest. Tell him he's been accepted to the Hogwarts School for Witchcraft and Wizardry. Give him the party information and, if you like, tell him to dress in uniform (robes).

Print the invitation out on parchment. Address it to each guest and seal the back of the envelope with wax.

If you want to have a little fun with it, buy each guest a small stuffed owl and glue or stitch the envelope to hang from its beak. You'll have to hand-deliver these to your guests, but the children will be delighted by the surprise.

Decorations

Purchase some Halloween plastic wall coverings depicting the inside of a castle. Hang them up on the walls in the main party room. Hang white Christmas lights from the ceiling mixed with crepe paper.

Gothic style decorations for Halloween or renaissance fairs make nice additions, such as candelabras, fancy goblets, and framed magic mirrors with ghostly images.

Get posters featuring the crests for each of the four houses featured in the series: Gryffindor, Slytherin, Hufflepuff and Ravenclaw. Hang them around the room.

Line some shelves with various-sized jars and bottles. You can even use some from your own spice cabinet. Label some jars with the names of potions and ingredients mentioned in the books: draught of the living death, polyjuice potion, lacewing flies, and bezoars.

Put a long table out for your guests to sit at. If you don't have a wooden table, use plain white table cloth, or purchase Harry Potter table cloths from a party store. Use gold plastic or paper plates and plastic flatware. Give each child her own plastic goblet or plastic champagne cup.

Put out your punch in a large Halloween plastic cauldron and treats out on fancy trays.

Activities

Treat the party as a "school day". Gather the children for "classes" to do different activities.

Tell them it's time for magical items class, and have a wand making craft. Provide the kids with dowels and an assortment of small gem stickers and paint,and let them make their own wands.

Then tell them it's time for potions class. This is a guessing game. Have an assortment of unmarked items in bottles and bowls. This could be different juices or teas, some baby foods, puddings, ground herbs, and anything else you can think of that is safe to taste. The "instructor" gives each child a dish, paper cup, piece of paper and pencil. Then instruct the children to identify each of the items. The child who correctly identifies the most items wins.

Next class is defense against the dark arts. For this class, the children will have to throw magical fireballs at a target. Give them red bean bags and create some targets, such as cardboard cut-outs of dementors (black-hooded figures).

Finally, bring the children outside for quidditch practice. To play ground quidditch, the children will need brooms from a Halloween shop to hop around on, hobby-horse style. To create the hoops, tape a hula hoop to the top of a long stick or dowel, and plant the stick into the ground. In the novels, there are three hoops on each side of the field, but you can use one on each side for simplicity. You will also need four Nerf bats, two Nerf balls in the same color to be the blodgers, one Nerf ball in a different color to be the quaffle, and a tennis ball to be the snitch.

Split the kids up into two teams, ideally of seven. Each team will elect a keeper to guard the goals, two beaters who will hold the bats, two chasers who will try to get the quaffle in the hoops, and a seeker to find the snitch. If you have more than 14 children at the party, the other children can help with the balls from the sidelines; if not, have adults to do it.

Give the children the quaffle. The two chasers in the game will have to try to get this ball into the opposite team's hoop, as the keepers try to block it. When a chaser gets a ball in, his team gets 10 points.

Two non-players will be in charge of the blodgers, throwing the balls at the chasers to throw them off. The beaters have the job of trying to bat the blodgers out of the way.

Two other people can be in charge of the snitch. Their job is to throw the tennis ball back and forth over the players, like a game of monkey in the middle. The team seekers have to try to catch the snitch. If one of the seekers succeeds, her team receives 150 points and the game is over. The team with the most points wins.

The kids at Hogwarts love their sweet treats. Make acid pops by brushing a light coating of honey onto a sour apple lollipop and rolling it in pop rocks. Serve some licorice sticks for licorice wands. Pumpkin pasties can be made by pressing store-ought sugar cookie dough into muffin tins, filling them with canned ready-to-use pumpkin pie filling, and baking them at 350 degrees until the cookie dough begins to brown. Make chocolate frogs by melting chocolate chips in a microwave or double boiler, and pouring them into frog shaped candy molds. Just allow them to cool and pop them out.

Harry Potter theme cakes are widely available at most bakeries. If you prefer to make your own cake, try making a spell book cake. Bake your favorite cake mix in two 9 X 13 inch pans. Put a layer of frosting in between and stack them. On the two short sides and one long side, frost it with a vanilla frosting. Use a brand new clean comb to comb across the edges, making it look like page lines. Then frost the top and the last long side of the book with chocolate. Use a colored icing in a bakers bag to write "Standard Book of Spells" along the spine.

Another option is to make a snitch cake for kids who love quidditch. Bake a cake mix in a round bowl. When it's cool, turn it over onto the tray and frost it with white icing. Make two wing shapes out of cardboard and cover it with feathers, leaving a plain cardboard tab sticking out. Stick these into the sides of the cake.

Party Favors

Give each guest a plastic Halloween cauldron to take home. Fill it with some of the goodies from the party, and raid your party store for things like magic tricks, puzzle games and Harry Potter party favors.

Wedding outfits

Monday, July 29, 2013