For My Halloween party I decided to do a Harry potter theme. I started out with the usual coffee darkened and burnt acceptance letters written in green calligraphy ink to invite everyone to my party. With my address on the inside. I put Hogwarts crest stickers in the return address. I added a second page like in the Harry Potter books where they have their school list I put stuff that they should bring some that they actually could others that are impossible. ie. unicorn horn, lizards tongue, lemon juice. I also added on the: you will need school robes to attend Hogwarts. I live by the train station so I just added a platform 9 3/4 sign and everyone loved it! I have two dogs so one we put a sign up as fluffy beware! and the other we said was Sirius. People really believed it was fluffy because he would bark every so often. When everyone arrived we did the sorting ceremony using a sorting hat bought off ebay with a walkie talkie sown in my dad enjoyed singing the sorting hat song and I told him attributes for each person so my friend who liked books went into hufflepuff for being studious. After they were sorted I took patches that I had hot glued onto pins so that we could keep them sorted afterwards. (A lot of the guys went into slytherin) After that we went into the brick alleys behind my house (all of them were labeled diagon alley, gringotts, flourish and blotts everything that was in the book) everyone had to go to gringotts to get wizard money to buy wands- for wands my dad took left over pieces of wood and drilled them so that people could choose what they wanted to put in their wands. After that it was set up like classes we had herbology where I had some fake plants combined with real ones in my moms conservatory the activities were planting mandrakes (using tights you put dirt and grass seed using rubber bands to create noses a head and  a body glue on googly eyes water and in a few weeks it will grow hair! everyone thought this was really fun because you could make your own mandrake and name it. The second activity was I took fake ivy vines and hot glued on easter eggs that I had spray painted green to match the ivy I put different types of seeds in them and every one had to use the books around the room to find out what they were. Everyone got into this one because of the competition some people already knew some of the seeds so others raced to catch up. It was really fun. I even got this real "goth garden" that had a meat eating plant and a vine that moved when you touched it nobody believed that it was real! I did a potions class where I had a cauldron with flames on the bottom from a party store that I put dry ice in so it would smoke. We had my uncle be Snape and he matched different houses up for groups. I had this in our cellar, in the back round I had different test tubes filled with jello and gummy eyes and other animals and fake brains and hearts that I got from the dollar store I had scales (like the ones used in court not a bathroom scale) that we could use for our potions for potions we made \*silly putty\*, bouncy balls, invisible ink and a luck potion that just happened to go wrong for several gryffindors. After this class we had lunch in the great hall (my dining room which is huge) and it was decorated in all the house colors with benches for each house and golden plastic platters bought from iparty\* which consisted of hot dog shaped squid and pig snouts w/ beans, monster foot hamburgers, eye deviled eggs, w/ bottled butterbeer (cream soda w/ a home made butter beer wrapper and bottled pumpkin juice same thing but with orange soda) After I had all home made wizarding desserts, pumpkin pasties, chocolate frogs, fizzing whizbees etc. Everybody thought it was awesome that I had cool regular food along with all the Harry Potter desserts. When everyone was done eating we had care of magical creatures outside with my dog Sirius of course we have woods behind our house for the forbidden forest. (My sister has tons of mythical animals and books of mythical animals so I had her teach the class. She used the monster book of monsters book cover that I had bought her to cover up the book she was using! We even got to hold my cousins salamander that I borrowed because they are considered magical creatures because they can withstand fire for several minutes because of a liquid that they secrete! It was awesome that I could have a real creature in my class! For the next class we had divination I used a crystal ball with a light underneath so everyone could take turns reading off pre printed hilarious fortunes or they could make one up as they went along. (Like in my future I was going to get married to a bowl of rice and live happily ever after! My friends beautiful prediction) for atmosphere I had a table covered with my moms astrological scarf, I had incense bought from Pier 1 imports\* Tea cups and my aunt dressed just like professor Trewlaney (including huge glasses and scarf) I also had these runes that I made from some spy code that I found in a book. Everyone had such a good time making each other predictions! Some were so funny they had my aunt laughing too. After this we had astrology where you had to find famous Harry potter characters such as: Sirius the dog star, Draco or draconis the dragon etc. I did this using a planetarium bought off ebay for 5$ I also had a glass light up moving solar system and on the door going in I had made constellations out of glow in the dark stars we also looked for other constellations on the star gazer while my other sister told us stories about the stars. You will be surprised how many constellations that everyone already knows! A lot of people liked seeing the stars and finding the patterns while the moving solar system was a big hit! After sitting for all this time we went outside and played muggle quidditch. You have someone who is not the seeker and hide the snitch while you have everyone else playing exactly the same as in the books except on the ground first team to have their seeker find the snitch wins! At the end of the game I had paid someone to have a trained owl bring me a letter (this wasn't very expensive around here but I don't know how expensive it will be around you and take into consideration that if you have younger kids they may be scared of the owl) it read that we were to return to the great hall it turns out that some of the things in the school have gone missing and need to be found or well be stuck there forever! Using the maurauders map as a treasure map all the teams go off in search for the missing school object (Mrs. Filch= a stuffed animal, the mirror of erised =hall mirror just be careful so that it doesn't get broken seven years of bad luck! Along with a bunch of other Hogwarts things and it doesn't just have to be hogwarts you can use the wizarding world too. After this the winning team went back and won prizes like a Harry potter broom, Harry Potter coins, sweatshirt and so on every one else got goodie bags filled with bought Harry potter candy, magic tricks, a wizard hat treat=(a ice cream cone covered in chocolate then filled with candy and prizes and sealed with a cookie on bottom) a edible prize!, hand made snitch keychains and tons of other cheap wizarding stuff everyone left gradually so we played dementor freeze tag where Remus has to give you a mini chocolate and then you have to learn the patronus charm before you can go the last person then becomes one of the dementors and other Harry Potter games I made up as we went along after it got dark though the last of us went in and watched the movie everyone had loads of fun even the ones that didn't even read harry potter and the leftover costumes were great for Halloween in the next few days for younger kids the activities can just be simplified but everyone had a great time even though we are older so I hope this helps someone even though its really long!