Being a part of the millennial generation, it’s hard to find someone who doesn’t like Harry Potter. Our generation grew up as the books and movies came out: we are the children who anxiously awaited their Hogwarts letters on their eleventh birthdays (I’m totally still holding out for mine eight years later – it must’ve gotten lost in the mail, maybe the Weasleys’ ancient owl Errol was in charge of delivering it). We are the ones who attended midnight book and movie premieres and dressed up as the characters for Halloween. I proudly flaunt my Gryffindor pride whenever possible and will take you down with chants of “Go, Go, Gryffindor!” if you dare to cross me with the claim that another house is better.
That being said, I don’t think I need to elaborate any further to drive home the point that Harry Potter has been an integral part of my childhood. If you are close to my age, there’s a good chance it’s been an integral part of your childhood, too. What I consider to be pretty special is the role that the Harry Potter series has played in my family ever since my dad first started to read the first book to my brother and me.
I was five the first time I heard someone mention Harry Potter, and at the time all I heard was that the movie had a scary scene with a dead unicorn in it. (Not the best way to get a five-year-old interested in a work of fiction.) I’ll have to ask my parents for more details about this one, but a year later, my dad was somehow sold on the book series and brought our first piece of Harry Potter merchandise into the family when he bought the first book. The year was 2002 and already J. K. Rowling had written the first four books; the second movie came out in the fall of that year. I found my dad’s reading pace too slow — he had to pause and explain things to my brother, then four years old, too often for my liking — and soon, I like to believe, took the family copy of "The Sorcerer's Stone" hostage as I read it to myself at a more suitable pace.
Even that first foray into the wizarding world set the precedent for the next several years of my family’s lives: every time a new book came out, I sat down and binge-read it in a day or two, then my mom finished it soon afterward, and finally my dad read it aloud to my brother, the two of them taking their time. My family took Harry Potter extremely seriously from the start, meaning that I was strictly prohibited from talking about the books to family members who hadn’t finished reading them yet; the days when I waited for my mom to finish reading were always the most agonizing waits of my young life as I struggled to keep the spoilers to myself, and the moment she finished I would open the floodgates of my Harry Potter talk to her and promptly have to shut up again as soon as my dad or brother walked in. Dumbledore was my mom’s favorite character after Sirius died, and I distinctly remember silently feeling sorry for my mom for having two favorite characters killed off in rapid succession and wondering how she would react when she got to the chapter in "The Half-Blood Prince" where Dumbledore died. (When it happened, she came into my room to say goodnight to me and quietly told me that she’d finished the book. She asked me if I’d cried and I said, “Mom, I’m a kid,” as if a kid crying at a book were the craziest notion ever, but I thought it was okay if she’d cried because she was a mom and that was her favorite character who’d died.)
Just like the respective speeds at which every member of my family read the first book started a pattern, we established a precedent for our movie-watching early in the series, too. Shortly after all of us read "The Sorcerer's Stone," the movie version of "The Chamber of Secrets" came out and we saw it in theaters. It was the first movie that my parents, brother, and I all saw together in a movie theater, and we would see all subsequent movies in the same manner. My dad dressed as Dumbledore, complete with a cloak, pointed wizard hat, long white beard, and the often-mentioned “half-moon spectacles,” at the premiere of the fourth movie, and he introduced the movie to the entire theater: pointing a rolled-up poster at the screen, he had the whole audience chant, “Accio Movie!” I was nine years old and I slunk down in my seat, mortified and trying desperately to hide behind my slushie cup, but we got a free "Goblet of Fire" movie poster out of it that still hangs in the basement. Ten years later, I look back on the experience and appreciate that I have a pretty cool dad. I was at summer camp when the second part of the "Deathly Hallows"movie premiered, but my family took me to see it as soon as I returned home.
Harry Potter represents a series of personal firsts for me, some of them sincere and nostalgic and others airing more on the side of funny. The fourth movie was the first movie that ever made me cry — I teared up when Amos Diggory realized Cedric was dead and ran to pry his body away from Harry, and the sensation of crying at a movie was completely strange and foreign to me. The seventh book was the first book – and so far the only book – that I read so intensely over the course of just twenty-four hours that I strained my eyes and made one of them twitch for the next few days. My dad found me the first fan fiction story I ever read on a website called MuggleNet. It was about Harry and Ginny as a married couple after Hogwarts, and I think my mom looks back on the endless hours I frittered away reading Harry Potter fan fiction all through middle and high school and rues the day my dad printed that story and brought it home from work. Hermione was my first serious role model and she remains my role model to this day; I needed to excel in school from the time I was in first grade because Hermione was an excellent student and I wanted to be just like her. I even put painstaking effort into making my handwriting smaller and neater until my teachers started telling me to write bigger because, according to one of the books, Hermione’s handwriting was tiny. I did my first major research project, an “Independent Learning Project” in fifth grade, on J. K. Rowling and Harry Potter. The day I presented, I got to stand in front of my class in a Hogwarts uniform and talk for hours about my favorite topic. A poster I made explaining some of the characters’ names still resides in my basement, announcing in the most magical font I could find that Remus Lupin’s name clearly alludes to the fact that he’s a werewolf and that “Malfoy” comes from a French phrase meaning “bad faith.”
Nowadays I bond with friends over Harry Potter – because what college student doesn’t know every word to “The Mysterious Ticking Noise” from "Potter Puppet Pals?" – but the magic hasn’t vanished from my household. My brother’s numerous Harry Potter Lego sets still stand fully constructed on the basement shelves, even though we haven’t played out the adventures of Harry and his friends or built the Burrow out of the biggest flat Lego platforms we owned in years. (How did we even find enough red Lego hair pieces for nine Weasleys?) Our books still live in their rightful places, enshrined in all of their glory, and our DVDs of all the movies are broken out every so often. My dad and brother still have a “Quidditch pitch” assembled in the front yard using hula-hoops and a net meant for soccer practice. Our cats proudly bear the names of Hedwig and Hermione. Maybe my whole family hasn’t dressed up in full wizarding regalia in years, but we will always have the memories of those book and movie premieres, all the times we attended Harry Potter-related events around Halloween, and possibly tooth decay from the chocolate frogs and Bertie Bott’s Beans we consumed. The wizarding world has been a part of my family for thirteen years, almost like another magical little sibling who brings us closer together. And it’s here to stay.
