Harry Potter Halloween Trunk or Treat

We've never done a trunk or treat until this year. We were signed up at our church for a Sunday-before-Halloween event. Unfortunately, the Saturday-before-the-Sunday was booked with an away soccer game and a school Halloween event, where both of us were signed up for bringing baked goods and working the pizza sales table. The last thing we wanted to do was go out and get decorations for a trunk or treat.

Thank Merlin, I keep a party box filled with all our Harry Potter stuff. Just pulled it out to transform the mini-van hatch into Hogwarts! We didn't have to buy a thing (except treats to give out, of course).

We used the castle stone wall backdrop and our Harry Potter Hogwart's Printed Wall Bannerfor a background inside the van. I propped/taped the backdrop up onto an old science fair cardboard display stand. Then we added a generic Halloween banner across the top with some clips.

The old crumpled up brown paper bag Sorting Hat was resurrected from the box, given a facelift with some brown marker, and clipped up to the top of the door.

I dug out some unused closet wire shelving from the garage and twist tied them together to make a Dragon Crate. I had the kids pull out all their stuffed dragons from their numerous giant bins of critters to fill it.

The Guy's snowy white owl puppet Harfang filled in as Hedwig and was mounted on a stick on the side.

We draped a folding chair in black and displayed our official HP wands in their Ollivanders boxes which we had gotten from Diagon Alley at Universal Studios before. We also draped a folding kitchen stool in black and displayed a couple of plastic pumpkin cauldrons containing the candy.

The last touch was digging out the CD music which ended up being drowned out by the DJ's party music for most of the event. But it was still pretty cool. Wade and I put on some black cloaks (I borrowed K's old Gryffindor costume) and we were ready for Trunk or Treat!

One is never too old for Harry Potter...