The Complete Idiot's Guide to the World of Harry Potter (18 page)

Wizards are big on feasts, and to a lesser extent, on balls (that is, dances), too. Welcoming feasts are common at British boarding schools, but they’re not referred to as “feasts,” nor are they major celebrations. Instead, at British boarding schools, they serve you dinner the first night, and that qualifies as the “welcoming feast.”

But in the wizarding world, every opportunity for a celebration turns into a feast: the welcome at the beginning of the year; the celebration at the end of the year; and just about every holiday in between. You’ve got to imagine that it costs a lot of Galleons to keep Hogwarts flush with all those feasts!

Hogwarts opens each school year with a Welcoming Feast, where new students are sorted into their houses, and a Leaving Feast, where the Inter-House Championship is awarded to one of the four houses. See Chapter 8 for more on Hogwarts’ houses. Whenever possible, the Great Hall is decorated splendidly, but in decidedly magical ways—in fact, the ceiling of the Great Hall can be charmed to reflect the outdoor sky, or any other color scheme, for that matter. Although the castle is old and dark, the staff always find ways to make the students feel at home.

During the winter holidays, to the delight of the headmaster, feasts usually include wizard crackers. A regular cracker is a British holiday tradition: a combination toy and gift, when you pull the cracker apart (it’s roughly the size of a paper towel tube, or even a little smaller), it makes a loud “bang!” and then out spill small treats or even small, inexpensive gifts. (It is not uncommon, however, for British men proposing to their girlfriends near the holidays to put an engagement ring in a cracker.) Crackers are sort of the same idea as a piñata, but much smaller and with the added fun of noise.

Wizard crackers, on the other hand, don’t make a charming “bang!” but go off like a cannon blast that ends with an explosion of blue smoke, filled with small treats or gifts. Those unaware of the difference between British and wizard crackers have been quite thoroughly frightened.

Wizard balls are celebrations of the senses. Bands perform, wizards put on their best dress robes (see Chapter 3), and everyone dances. As with American proms and balls, food isn’t the focus; although food is served, no one thinks less of a ball if the meal isn’t the tastiest they’ve ever had. But hire the wrong band, and the entire ball is ruined.

Balls have a long tradition in Europe, one that has continued in American culture. Dances, proms, cotillions, and balls are a requirement of teenage and young adult life, and nothing gets a young girl more in a ball frame of mind than the
Cinderella
fairy tale. It’s an age-old sentiment: dress up any girl in the right clothes and shoes, with care given to her hair and makeup, and give her a well-furbished vehicle in which to ride, and she’ll be transformed—so much so that she’ll win herself a prince.

Traveling through the wizarding world offers no fewer options than traveling in any other world. Wizards can journey by air, by train, by bus, and even by car on occasion. But in the wizarding world, air travel will be aboard a broomstick, train travel is on a secret train that can be accessed only by crashing headlong into a brick wall, bus travel is a hair-raising experience, and car travel is either in deceptively expansive vehicles or in the illegal flying variety. In addition, wizards travel through a network of fireplaces, by learning to appear and disappear at will, and even by touching just one finger to an object of trash before being whisked off to a prearranged destination.

Train travel is far more common in Great Britain than it is in the United States, so no one there would be surprised to discover that the chief method of traveling to Hogwarts School is by train. What might surprise them is that the Hogwarts Express is an old-fashioned steam train, not the streamlined, modern trains found across Europe, Japan, and the United States today.

As with Muggle trains, passengers board a train on a platform—a waiting area in a train station. What’s unusual about the Hogwarts Express, however, is that the platform is not visible to Muggles—instead, partway between Platforms 9 and 10 (which Muggles can see and use), wizard school children run into the brick wall and emerge—magically!—onto Platform 9
³
?4 on the other side. Only wizards are able to accomplish this feat.

Traveling by train can be a fantastic experience, especially if you’re staying the night and have your own private sleeping berth. You can buy meals and snacks on the train (or, as with the Hogwarts Express, train personnel come around with a food cart from which you can buy snacks). The food on a train generally isn’t great, the bathrooms and sleeping berths are tiny, and you may experience a lot of rocking, jerking, and whistle-blowing—all of which can keep you awake at night. But you’re also able to take in the scenery without having to concentrate on driving, you have much more room to stretch out and more opportunities to walk around than in a bus or plane, and strangers tend to mingle while in the dining car or even in their seats, which gives you a chance to meet a variety of people. For information on train travel in North America, visit (United States) or (Canada).

Brooms in the wizarding world look much like brooms in the Muggle world—not like today’s modern brooms made of vinyl and other plastics, but like the brooms of old, which were made with a nobby but polished solid-wood handle and a head of straw or similar material. The only difference is that the wizard variety have the key addition of a Flying Charm and, sometimes, a Braking Charm.

The wizard task of riding a broom is very much like riding a bicycle is for Muggles—children love to do it because of the freedom it affords them, and some continue the activity well into adulthood (using it as a means of transportation and/or exercise), while others drop it in favor of less demanding traveling methods. While perhaps not as physically exertive as riding a bike can be, broom riding is definitely a form of exercise, one at which some wizards excel.

Brooms are also a bit like Muggle horses, in that wizards have invented a hugely popular sport to play while on broomstick, much like polo is played on horseback. You’ll learn more about Quidditch and other wizard games in Chapter 6.

Brooms are reliable, safe, fun, and relatively inexpensive, especially if bought used. Wizards arrive at their destinations a bit windblown, but not nearly as dirty as when they travel the Floo Network (described in the following section). Plus, broomstick-riding doesn’t require the great skill that Apparition does, as you’ll see later in this chapter. In fact, many witches and wizards choose to never become proficient at Apparating, and opt instead for traveling by broomstick and the Floo Network.