In 2015, on July 31st, I brought in a few magical themed treats to work. Some magic wands, cockroach clusters, and chocolate frogs. I set them in our small kitchen with Harry Potter themed labels and a small sign. I wore a Harry Potter t-shirt. And that was that.
The next year, I had a coworker excited about Harry Potter as well and we devised a grander scheme to celebrate Harry’s Birthday that included sorting all our coworkers into the four houses, labeling all the rooms in our office as rooms in Hogwarts, and doing a beginner’s and advanced trivia.
The year after that we introduced the House Cup and coworkers competed for points throughout the day. Slytherin stole the whiteboard we were using to track the points on that year, starting a tradition of sabotage that’s been hard to shake.
To my surprise and delight, Harry Potter Day has grown each year; we always celebrate on the last Friday of July. Last year employees asked for a committee since they wanted to participate. A committee all about Harry Potter . . . you can see that I work in a wonderful place.
Here’s an overview of what Harry Potter looked like this year:
Decorations:
We decorated our all-hands room with (fake) candles hanging from the ceiling to imitate the Great Hall and set up props for a wizarding themed photo booth. A ghost (repurposed from Halloween) was labeled Sir Nicholas De Mimsy Porpington. At the top of the hall was a bowl with all four house crests where we collected employee shout-outs to read at a meeting later in the day. On the whiteboard wall, we kept track of the House Points.
We replaced all our conference rooms and office signs with Hogwarts room names like “Room of Requirement”, “Hagrid’s Hut”, “Gryffindor Tower”, etc… I used a Harry Potter font (there’s a free one called “Harry P” you can download) and pictures of the chapter illustrations by Mary Grandpre.
Another repurposed Halloween decoration . . . I led a trail of spiders into a small office where a giant spider (Aragog) proclaimed Hagrid’s innocence . . . but that his children would now eat you.
Libations:
Most importantly, we had Harry’s cake that Hagrid gives him on his eleventh birthday: a “chocolate cake with ‘Happy Birthday Harry‘ written on it in green icing.”
I also brought in chocolate wands, Hogwarts House chocolate chip cookies (just cookies with food dye to match the houses) and my coworker made bread pudding. We were light on the other snacks since we also had a catered lunch for the company today. In past years we’ve also had butterbeer – this year we stuck to beer and cider in the fridge . . . we were pretty sugared out.
Sorting:
All employees were sorted into the four houses, resulting in equal teams. We gave employees the opportunity to choose their house (it is our choices, after all), to take an all-question Pottermore quiz, or be randomly sorted. About half of our workforce chose their house ahead of time. Today people wore sticker badges to indicate their house.
House Cup:
The major event of the day was the House Cup, where we all competed to earn points for the house and win bragging rights (and a free lunch next week). We had many different ways to earn points including:
- Writing an “I Appreciate You” note for someone
- Reciting our Key Business & Culture Drivers
- Writing a haiku about our company or Harry Potter
- Taking a picture in the wizarding photo booth
- Complete the Sorcerer’s Stone Challenge (in-office scavenger hunt)
- Complete Sustainability Challenge (an HP themed sustainability quiz)
- Complete Portkey Challenge (a virtual scavenger hunt through our company intranet)
- Wearing a costume or HP attire
- Complete a course in our learning management system
- Participating and placing in trivia
We track points throughout the day on a google sheet and update the whiteboard. It’s a little bit of chaos, but a lot of people really get into the competition.
This is the third year we’ve done a House Cup. Hufflepuff won in 2017, Ravenclaw in 2018, and this year I am pleased to say I rallied my own house and Gryffindor finally took the cup!
Trivia:
For the last four years, we’ve done Harry Potter trivia. It’s taken a couple of differnet forms, but we’ve found the best way to include more HP knowledge levels is to do rounds with each round getting progressively more difficult. This means it’s fun for the casual HP fan at the beginning and the die-hard HP fans at the end. This was a compromise we had to make when we realized two years ago that more people wanted to participate than just me and my equally-HP obsessed former coworker . . . we isolated a lot of people by jumping right into advanced questions.
This year we did 5 rounds of 7 questions per round. The questions were expertly crafted by my friend Lin. My trivia is books only. No movies. No Pottermore. Books 1-7. Canon.
Though I continue to have at least one real HP expert-level challenger, I am still the undefeated champion.
With Love,
Natalie
I love this! I want to work there!😉❤️🧙♂️