We read Harry Potter book #1 over the last few weeks, with the promise that when we finished it we’d watch the movie version. Then, deciding to add a bit of fun we stopped and grabbed Harry Potter chocolate frogs and jelly bellies at the store.
That was going to be the extent of our theming… until I got an idea to see if I could make our table into more of a Hogwarts feast and bring some themed goodness into our girl’s night. My rules were simple: No buying anything new, everything has to be found in my house and/or in my yard. Challenge, accepted!
There were whispers upstairs in the girl’s room that Hedwig the owl might be dropping a Hogwarts package of wizardry and fun… that our movie night might be more of a fancy feast… well if you call cutting out + painting paper lightning bolts onto plastic cups fancy, well then this is the place.
The food – it is simply food we were going to have for a snacks/small bites style dinner. The runner on the table is just some fabric I have (and in fact used last Thanksgiving!) I named the food and made a fancy menu – I’ll give the how-to for that tomorrow.
The one thing I had wanted was a bunch of candles… but I couldn’t find my box of LED (aka no flame!) tea lights so I just let that go. I did have two LED snowflake faux candles – we rolled with those. I spent about 40 minutes total making my menu, digging up the few details I could come up with, and setting up the table. Time in the kitchen? 30min max. it was a HOT day and we already had planned to not cook really.
When I was ready I turned the music (on the menu of the DVD) way up and the girls knew it was time for some food + fun. The thing that really struck me in doing this was a) it really wasn’t that much effort or time b) it didn’t cost me extra, we just used food (except the jelly beans) we already had and c) it really made a simple Sunday evening movie night FUN.
We have more themed movie and in general personal little ‘party’ themes in mind – I’ll be sharing them here all summer long.