Here's my Harry Potter Halloween secret: I make three things once, and they cover half of my costume list. The money I don't spend at the costume shop goes into the house instead, and the house is what everyone remembers.
I'm Charlee. I've written Attempting Aloha since 2010, and we've done a wizard Halloween at our house since my girls were small enough to fit in a pillowcase. Four kids, a lot of Octobers, and never once a trip to the costume shop.
Why Halloween is the wizarding holiday
Halloween runs through the books more than any other night, which is why this theme works so well in October:
- Philosopher's Stone, chapter 10, "Hallowe'en": the feast with live bats over the tables, and the troll in the dungeon.
- Chamber of Secrets, chapter 8, "The Deathday Party": Nearly Headless Nick's five-hundredth, with black candles and a ghost orchestra on musical saws.
- Prisoner of Azkaban, chapter 8, "Flight of the Fat Lady": Hogsmeade, and the slashed portrait.
So the party plan writes itself. A feast first, a Deathday corner for the people who've read the books twice, and a porch that looks like the road to Hogsmeade.
The three DIY basics (about 20 minutes, a few dollars per kid)
1. The house tie. A striped thrift-store tie, or two ribbons stitched together in house colors.
2. The robe. A black graduation gown, a black sheet with a head hole hemmed with hot glue, or a black bathrobe with the belt pulled off.
3. The wand. A chopstick, a ring of hot glue a third of the way up for the grip, then brown paint. Make four while the glue gun is hot. I keep a coffee can of them in the hall closet all year.
Then each character needs one signature detail, and nobody looks at the rest. Hermione gets slept-on braids and three library books. Luna gets cardboard Spectrespecs and a cork necklace. Hagrid gets a pink umbrella. Dobby gets one sock. That's the whole costume department.
The porch: floating candles for under $15
The floating candles from the Great Hall are the one decoration every guest photographs, and they're the cheapest thing on my list.
What you need:
- Paper towel tubes or rolled white cardstock, cut to different lengths (6 to 10 inches).
- Battery tea lights, the flickering kind. A pack of 24 is usually under $10.
- Fishing line and a few thumbtacks or removable hooks.
Paint or wrap the tubes white, drip a little hot glue around the top rim so it looks like melted wax, and set a tea light in each one. Hang them from the porch ceiling at different heights. Twelve to twenty tubes is plenty for an average porch. At dusk the fishing line disappears, and they really do look like they're floating.
For the bushes, I tear a pack of gray cheesecloth into long strips and drape it loosely. Don't make it neat. Ghosts are not neat.
Pumpkins: carve, paint or cheat
We do three kinds of pumpkins, because the kids are different ages and not all of them get a knife.
| Pumpkin | Who does it | Time | What you need |
|---|---|---|---|
| Lightning bolt, carved | Teens and grown-ups | 30 min | A carving kit, a dry-erase marker for the outline |
| Hedwig owl, painted | Ages 7 and up | 45 min with drying | Black acrylic paint, a gold paint pen |
| Harry's glasses, marker | The littles | 5 min | A black marker, a white pumpkin if you can find one |
My best tip: draw the design in dry-erase marker first. If it looks wrong, wipe it off and try again. A lightning bolt is harder to get right than you'd think, and dry-erase is a perfectly good rehearsal.
The Deathday corner
This one is for the older kids and the grown-ups who know the books. Nearly Headless Nick's Deathday Party in Chamber of Secrets is gloriously gross: rotting food, black candles, a cake shaped like a tombstone. We do a very mild version on one side table.
- A gray tablecloth or a gray sheet.
- Black LED candles. Real flames and robes don't mix, so they're always battery.
- A cake with gray frosting. Add black food coloring to white frosting a drop at a time; it goes from white to gray to "oops, that's black" fast.
- A card that says "Deathday Party, 500 years."
- Fake cobwebs and a couple of black felt rats.
The kids think the gray cake is the funniest thing they've ever seen. It's a plain vanilla cake.
The feast
We keep the feast simple and serve it at the dining table, under a string of paper bats. A bat is a folded black paper rectangle with two snips. Hang twenty of them over the table on fishing line, and you've made the Great Hall on Halloween.
Our feast menu, all things the kids will actually eat:
- A roast chicken, or a tray of drumsticks, because that's the closest thing to the feast in the films.
- Jacket potatoes with a butter-and-cheese bar.
- Pumpkin pasties: store-bought pie crust, canned pumpkin filling, folded into half-moons, 20 minutes at 400°F.
- Pumpkin juice: apple cider, a splash of apricot nectar and a pinch of pumpkin pie spice.
- Treacle tart for dessert if someone in the family bakes, or a bag of toffees on a plate if no one does.
What it all costs
Here's roughly what a full wizard Halloween costs us, costumes and house together:
- Robes, ties and wands for four kids: about $20 (mostly thrift store)
- Floating candles and fishing line: about $15
- Cheesecloth and cobwebs: about $8
- Pumpkins: depends on your patch, usually $15 to $25
- Deathday corner (cake, black candles, felt): about $12
- Feast groceries: about $30
That's around $100 to $110 for costumes, decorations and dinner for a family of six. One licensed boxed costume per kid would cost more than that alone.
Q&A
What's the easiest Harry Potter costume for a last-minute Halloween? A robe, a house tie and a wand. That's a generic Hogwarts student, and it takes about 20 minutes with things from your closet.
How do you make floating candles that don't fall? Hang each tube from its own length of fishing line tied to a hook or thumbtack, and glue the tea light in place. Wind is the enemy, so on a breezy porch keep them close to the wall.
Which Harry Potter films should we watch on Halloween night? The first three, in order. The Hallowe'en feast is near the start of the first one.
Do I need a sewing machine? No. Every costume and decoration on my list is hot glue, cardboard, cheesecloth and fishing line.
The full list
All 14 costumes, 12 porch and yard decorations, 8 pumpkins and the Hallowe'en feast menu, with what you need and how I make each one, are here: Harry Potter Halloween Costumes & Decorations: 34 DIY Ideas.
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Mahalo for reading! — Charlee