Happy Belated Birthday, Harry!

First off, how in the world is it August already? I feel like I blinked and missed almost all of 2019 up to this point. At this rate Halloween is this weekend, Thanksgiving is between 3 and 4 on Monday, Christmas is Tuesday night, and the ball drops after the last present is unwrapped. Happy 2020, y’all!

Yesterday was a big day for us, but it was also Harry Potter’s 39th Birthday! (If celebrating the birthdays of fictional characters is your thing I might just be your people!) Cue my annual (sometimes more than annual) re-read of the series. Most of my reading is done late at night, long after I should have been asleep, but I do get the occasional morning chapters in too.

I was in high school when Harry Potter and the Sorcerer’s Stone was released in the US, several years past the intended target age for the series up to that point. I knew about the book, of course, but it had flown well under my radar, and I had zero interest in picking it up. Even the extremely successful releases of the 2nd and 3rd books in the series weren’t enough to tempt me to read them. 

I come from a long line of bookworms, and fortunately for me my uncle’s family had started reading the books out loud. They recommended the series to my grandmother who suggested it to her teenage granddaughter while she visited during a school vacation. (Me. It was me.)

“That’s a little kid series.” was my scathing reply. Oh, the ignorance of youth. There was no argument from Grandmama, only a knowing smile, but that night I found that a copy of Harry Potter and the Sorcerer’s Stone had been placed carefully on my bedside table next to the reading lamp. No one knew me better than Grandmama. “Little kid series” or not she knew full well that I couldn’t resist the temptation of a brand new book staring me right in the face at bedtime. 

A very tired, very humble teenage Holly joined her grandparents downstairs the next day having spent the wee hours of the morning exploring a castle called Hogwarts trying to solve the mystery of what was in that grubby package and who was killing unicorns in the Forbidden Forest. 

It's hard to put into words what this series has meant to me since then. Books have often been an escape for me during my most difficult times, and Hogwarts became a place I could disappear for a few hours when I most needed it. When I was younger I would regularly read through the series a half dozen times a year, but these days I make a point to do in annually, and I’ll do it forever. 

"Until the very end.”