A Harry Potter Halloween

Every 90s kid probably remembers badly wanting to transfer from Muggle school into Hogwarts. You can imagine how pumped I was when our campus gym hosted a series of Harry Potter fitness events on Halloween. That entailed me getting up at 6 AM to attend a spinning (stationary bike) class that turned out to be full before it started! My friends and I did our cardio squat/bench routine anyway and even had time to spare for a nice breakfast before class. One participant was kind enough to give me her magical chocolate frog box, which contained a massive hunk of milk chocolate and a holographic wizard card of Salazar Slytherin! To my surprise, when it finally split open with a knife, I discovered it was solid milk chocolate (don't know why I expected rice crispy material). At least when I'm surrounded by dementors I won't be in short supply ;)

After going into research lab and analyzing data for a few hours, I returned for Zumba, which started out with a hilarious Harry Potter theme dubstep remix and continued in an hour-long, sweat-drenched session of dancing, jump squatting, salsa, hip hop cardio. The souvenir for this activity was a massive wand with a hole at the end for my phoenix feather placement, I suppose. We dabbled in trivia, sipped butterbeer (cream soda root beer vanilla ice cream), and I even grabbed a tiny pumpkin that I named "Pumpkin 9 and 3/4" after the famous platform. Trick or treating this year would have been a fun last hoorah but Ohio weather decided to dump rain all over Halloween ... classic. Instead of being soaked to the bone and miserable, I opted for a cozier approach to the evening: blogging, watching Ghostbusters, and drinking a chai soymilk latte while studying the thyroid. Happy Halloween!

Readers - how did you celebrate Halloween this year?
Written for and originally posted on { pandaphilia.com }