My cousin Dianne and I hadn’t been planning on another Harry Potter party so soon after the last one, and we wanted to focus on reading Harry Potter and the Cursed Child when it was released earlier this year. We think we’re just about done doing the run-of-the-mill Hogwarts-style Potter party (after having done it so many times, I guess?), but we couldn’t resist a Fantastic Beasts party in anticipation of the upcoming film, so we reserved it for Halloween this year.
We weren’t fans of the original movie franchise (and even stopped watching the films at some point), but I think we’re more open to Fantastic Beasts simply because we have no existing head canon for it. It just sucks that we’ll be in different cities when the film finally hits the big screen next week, but we’ll surely be messaging back and forth about the film when both of us finally get to watch it.
Oh, and an aside — we watched Doctor Strange the night before the party and came across this standee, and we just had to take photos.
Anyway, here’s a recap of the Harryween party.
First, behind the scenes. Actually this wasn’t very labor-intensive. We have so much Harry Potter stuff accumulated over the years that if we wanted to throw a Harry Potter party in a jiffy, we could easily do it! Haha, we thought we would have trouble coming up with Fantastic Beasts decor, with very little to go on based on the trailers, but ha, we actually found a lot of things from our Harry Potter stockpile to use as decor, including several editions of the books.
Most of our time was occupied making the little loot trunks, because we wanted it to be on theme. I scored and folded the cardboard into boxes and added the corner trims, while Dianne worked on the belts. We’ve done a variation of these trunks before, for our I Capture the Castle discussion, and so we were more chill this time around.
And voila:
It was an intimate party, as a lot of our friends were out of town, but it was still a lot of fun.
Dianne and I came as Newt Scamander and Tina Goldstein, with our friend Mika as Queenie Goldstein:
We also had friends from the book club (including a 1920s dilettante, haha):
A dueling witch and wizard:
Fawkes and young Albus
Time traveling Moaning Myrtle (who was our baby Golden Snitch back in 2007!)
And Queenie’s gang:
And our littlest wizard:
After a dinner of pasta, cold cuts and cheese, we had a Fantastic Beasts trivia game:
After two rounds, the winners were Paolo and Mika, who either read the book or took some Felix Felicis!
We also had a Scamander Hunt, which had our four intrepid teams running around the place (and into the street) to take photos.
It was a fantastic night, and I can’t wait to see the movie next week!