There's no place like Hogwarts for the Holidays
What Harry and pals have to teach us about the magic of Christmas
Standard Harry Potter-related disclaimer: I’m both aware of and disgusted by some of the views espoused by the books’ author, J.K. Rowling, including her rather hateful and purposely ignorant and public takes on the transgender community. Subscribers who know me already know I’m not down with that at all. And now, subscribers who don’t know me can also know that I’m not down with that at all. So for all intents and purposes, I treat Harry Potter as a sort of authorless text that belongs to us all now, and as such we do what we want with it, including taking all the lovely stuff for ourselves; and, in this case, writing joyful holiday posts about them.
That also includes being critical of the series (oh, there’s so much to critique), and for that, I offer my highest recommendation to my fellow Potter Prof Julian Wamble and his excellent podcast, “Critical Magic Theory.” It’s a sensational, often-hilarious, and always-thoughtful podcast about Potterworld and all its issues through a critical, analytical lens. Each week looks at a new character, and a few weeks back I was thrilled to join Julian to talk about Barty Crouch, Jr — a scrooge if ever there was one — and it was a joyful experience. Plus, the theme song is an all-time bop.
So with all that disclaimed, and a pod recommended, let’s get to the main event. Happy Christmas to all!
I’m quite sure that for 99% of the people in my life, I am the biggest “Potterhead” they are likely to have met. I read all seven books every 18 months or so. I once very nearly aced the “Top 200 Characters” Harry Potter Sporcle Quiz, which is much harder than it looks. My friends used to play a game where they would take out one of the books from my shelf, flip to a random page, read a single sentence or phrase, and I could tell them not just the book, but the chapter and the full context of the scene in which it was found. These include phrases like “They could see her forehead reddening over the top of her book.” (from Prisoner of Azkaban, in the chapter “The Firebolt” when Professor McGonnagall comes to confiscate Harry’s new broom after Hermione suspects it was sent to him by Sirius Black [it was, of course; Hermione is always right])
This disturbing obsession may make it all the more surprising that it took until this year for me to learn that the Harry Potter films — all eight of them, which came out between 2001 and 2011 — are widely agreed to be Christmas movies.
Don’t believe me? Make your way over streaming service Peacock, where just halfway down the “Holiday” content page is the whole collection of HP films under the conspicuous “Happy Christmas, Harry” header.
Head over instead to Max (formerly HBO Max) and there’s Harry again, featured in the “That Time of Year” collection alongside other movies that actually make sense in the group (Elf, The Polar Express, Last Christmas) and others that don’t (Barbie?).
To be fair, I had not even seen all eight movies until fairly recently. By the time these movies starting coming out in the early 2000s, I already had a minds-eye version of Hogwarts and the rest of the Potterverse laid out in my own brain, and in my own painstaking detail. I had little interest in that internal map getting splotched over by whatever some hotshot director thought the Wizarding World was supposed to look and feel like.
Over time, I quite being so stubborn and caught up. I really do like most of the movies quite a lot, even though most of them are massively rushed and end up skipping over pretty crucial subplots; certain moments, and characters, are also way, way off tonally from the books1, which made it difficult for me to fall in love with them the way others have. But they’re beautifully filmed, and for the most part do better than I expected of reflecting the kind of magical world I had constructed in my head as a kid.
I would not, however, have called any of them “Christmas movies.” Miracle on 34th Street is a Christmas movie; so is Home Alone; and, yes, so is Love Actually. What’s so Christmassy about Harry Potter? After all, this is a series about witchcraft, in a castle featuring ghosts and poltergeists, moving oil paintings and enchanted suits of armor; surely if there’s any holiday we’re going to attach to Harry Potter, it’s Halloween.
But no: after giving it far too much thought, and rereading the books for what must be the 30th or 40th time, I’ve come around to the the idea that at its heart, Harry’s story is defined not nearly so much by the spooky ghouls and spells that may have drawn us all in to begin with; but much more by the sense of home, family, and emotional poignancy that, for many of us, are so obviously the reason for the season. As it turns out, there’s no place like Hogwarts for the holidays.
Harry’s tale, as we likely know, is a tragic one. As an orphan, ignored (at best) and mistreated (at worst) by his adoptive childhood family, he can’t have had very many Christmases with happy memories attached. If there were anyone whose failure of festive spirit we might give a pass to, it would surely be Harry. For so many of us, Christmas has meaning because it’s a time of homecoming; it’s a time of family and warmth, of eating a bounty of great food; it’s defined by familiarity of places, faces, and generosity. Harry has grown up being adamantly and abusively denied all of this.
And so it makes a cathartic kind of sense for Christmas to play a pivotal role in Harry’s story of growth, pain, and eventual healing and heroics. Christmas is a natural narrative vehicle for charting his discovery not just of a place he can truly call home, but of his chosen family and all the wonderful complications that come with it. Thus, it’s also fitting — and ultimately heartbreaking — that Christmas is the setting for Harry’s full-circle realization about the loss of both home and family that defines his life. The first piece of the puzzle is Hogwarts itself, the school he’s whisked off to at eleven years old.
In so many ways, Christmas is about rituals undertaken in familiar places. For me, it’s driving out to Idaho City with my wife’s family to cut down and bring home that year’s tree, straight from the Boise National Forest (with proper permits, of course). Growing up in Rhode Island, it was the “Lessons and Carols” Christmas concerts at the local church (for many of which I contributed passable clarinet playing), or a walk down Benefit Street in Providence, which around the holidays has enough old-time New England charm to look downright Dickensian.
At Hogwarts, things are obviously different — it’s a magical castle in the Scottish highlands, you see — and yet comfortingly familiar as we see them unfold through Harry’s perspective and carve out a warm space in his heart that was previously occupied by the abuse he suffered at Privet Drive. Suits of armor sing carols in the hallways; Hagrid heroically drags in the giant Christmas tree from the Forbidden Forest to stand in the Great Hall, where Professor Flitwick enchants ornaments to decorate it with care; magnificent feasts and wizard crackers greet students at Christmas dinner. Descriptions like these, from Chamber of Secrets, set the scene nicely:
The Great Hall looked magnificent. Not only were there a dozen frost-covered Christmas trees and thick streamers of holly and mistletoe crisscrossing the ceiling, but enchanted snow was falling, warm and dry, from the ceiling. Dumbledore led them in a few of his favorite carols, Hagrid booming more and more loudly with every goblet of eggnog he consumed.
Other memorable spaces at Hogwarts are at their most magical during the holidays in ways that highlight Harry’s increasing sense of having found a true, safe home: the Weasleys’ snowball fights out on the grounds, say; or, of course, the four-poster dormitory Harry shares with his classmates, where he finds fresh gifts by his bedside each year.
And yet, later events take Harry away from Hogwarts during the holidays during the final three books (four movies). The merry frivolity of a holiday feast in the Great Hall, the mysterious gift of a new flying broomstick, and the singing suits of armor last only as long as Harry’s unjustly abbreviated childhood. Like many of us, the increasing gravity of Harry’s life pulls him outside of the safe walls of the first place he really called home, and out into much trickier territory.
After all, Christmas is much more than just a comfortable space with a warm fire and a hearty meal. The trappings of the holidays don’t mean nearly so much without someone(s) to inhabit them with. Many of us are lucky enough to have both of these two elements, home and family, that are so commonly associated with the Christmas season. This makes Harry’s transcendence of his tragic upbringing all the more stirring: he recreates from nothing not just the holiday home he never had in Hogwarts, but the family he had never gotten to enjoy it with.
This family begins, and eventually ends, with Harry’s two flawed but steadfast friends, Ron and Hermione. And while it’s true that Christmas isn’t (just) about the presents, it’s the consistently adorable giving around the holidays between these three, and soon many others, that help us chart the growth of Harry’s rapidly expanding family circle.
Harry’s childlike naiveté at the mere prospect of someone valuing him enough to give him a Christmas present tells us everything we need to know about the heartbreak of his upbringing. "Will you look at this?” Harry exclaims in Sorcerer’s Stone, waking up to his first Christmas morning at Hogwarts. “I've got some presents!" Ron, incredulous, responds: "What did you expect, turnips?" It’s a pitiful exchange in the truest sense of the word, but no mystery as to why Harry is surprised to learn his festive value. The amusing but insulting gifts Harry endures throughout the series from the Dursleys (a fifty-cent piece, a toothpick, a single tissue) paint their own dark, twisted picture of his ghosts of Christmases past.
But with each successive holiday at Hogwarts, Harry paints over that picture with more and more color and light drawing from more and more places and people. By the time we get to Goblet of Fire (book four), the trove of gifts by Harry’s bedside are the purest evidence yet of this goofy, diverse support system he accumulates at Hogwarts:
Hermione had given Harry a book called Quidditch Teams of Britain and Ireland; Ron, a bulging bag of Dungbombs; Sirius, a handy penknife with attachments to unlock any lock and undo any knot; and Hagrid, a vast box of sweets including all Harry's favorites: Bertie Bott's Every Flavor Beans, Chocolate Frogs, Drooble's Best Blowing Gum, and Fizzing Whizbees. There was also, of course, Mrs. Weasley's usual package, including a new sweater… and a large quantity of homemade mince pies.
Maybe most importantly, Christmas is the main setting chosen to develop and grow Harry’s relationship not just with friends he’s never really had, but with a lasting, more literal family that fills emotional gaps in a way the Dursleys were never going to. I speak, of course, of the Weasleys.
What begins with yearly Christmas sweaters knitted by Mrs. Weasley eventually changes shape into something more dignified, deep, and serious, especially once the safe space of Hogwarts exits Harry’s Christmas portrait pretty much for good in The Order of the Phoenix (book five). In this book, Voldemort has returned, and directs a vicious attack on Mr. Weasley that nearly kills him. Upon Arthur’s recovery, the family (including Harry) gather at Sirius’s residence at Grimmauld Place. Even at a solemn time, the Christmas spirit finds its way through because the family is safe:
The tarnished chandeliers were no longer hung with cobwebs but with garlands of holly and gold and silver streamers; magical snow glittered in heaps over the threadbare carpets; a great Christmas tree, obtained by Mundungus and decorated with live fairies, blocked Sirius's family tree from view; and even the stuffed elf heads on the hall wall wore Father Christmas hats and beards.
Surrounded by both the Weasleys, and for a tragically short time by Harry’s godfather, Sirius Black, we see that Harry’s ties are now so strong that despite its comfort, he doesn’t actually need the safety of Hogwarts to locate love, or Christmas cheer, for that matter. He just needs his family, who honors and appreciates his decency and generosity more than the Dursleys ever could.
In Hogwarts, Harry finds a home he never knew; in Ron and Hermione, the Weasleys, Sirius, and others, an adoptive family beyond the wildest dreams of his first eleven years. Both show up most palpably at the holidays, particularly in the middle books. But it’s the two Christmases that bookend Harry’s story that throw into sharp, affecting relief the weight of trauma and loss that these places and people have done all they can to lift from him.
In Harry’s first year, he is still by himself in many ways. He’s made friends, but every month brings something novel, exciting, and yet ultimately unfamiliar. At his core, Harry at this moment is still just an eleven-year-old kid who never really knew his parents, and has barely been given a chance to process the truth he learned just months earlier: that their death was not an accident, but a grotesque murder that he survived for reasons thus far unknown.
On that first Christmas in Sorcerer’s Stone, he is gifted (later, we learn, from Dumbledore) the invisibility cloak, an heirloom from his father. Harry finds himself pulled to use it almost immediately, and do so alone — without even his new confidants, Ron or Hermione — and stumbles upon the enchanting Mirror of Erised, which shows him his deepest desire: to be reunited with his long-gone family.
This scene is obviously touching at the time. But it completes its full, heartrending circle years later in Deathly Hallows (book seven), when Harry finds himself separated not just from Hogwarts, but from all but one (the ever-abiding Hermione) of the makeshift family he’s collected over the past seven years; he’s parted just a chapter or two earlier with Ron in a painful, broken fashion. Forced to grow up far too fast, he’s away from home in pursuit of a bigger, more important mission, and decides with Hermione to return to Godric’s Hollow: the birthplace he never knew, where his childhood with the parents he can’t remember was cut tragically short. He goes there in search of ways to finish off Voldemort and, in doing so, to save the only remaining family he does have.
When Harry and Hermione arrive windswept in a hometown Harry doesn’t recognize, they hear the singing of Christmas carols from the nearby town, and realize it’s Christmas Eve:
The singing grew louder as they approached the church. It made Harry's throat constrict, it reminded him so forcefully of Hogwarts, of Peeves bellowing rude versions of carols from inside suits of armor, of the Great Hall's twelve Christmas trees, of Dumbledore wearing a bonnet he had won in a cracker, of Ron in a hand-knitted sweater...
The church Harry and Hermione are approaching, amidst the most painful possible reminders of the safe life at Hogwarts they’ve left behind, is the one where Harry’s parents are buried. Weary and battle-worn, they arrive at the gravestones, and to the end of the circle of loss that began at the enchanted mirror six Christmases ago:
He should have brought something to give them, and he had not thought of it, and every plant in the graveyard was leafless and frozen. But Hermione raised her wand, moved it in a circle through the air, and a wreath of Christmas roses blossomed before them. Harry caught it and laid it on his parents' grave…
… Tears came before he could stop them, boiling hot then instantly freezing on his face, and what was the point in wiping them off or pretending? He let them fall, his lips pressed hard together, looking down at the thick snow hiding from his eyes the place where the last of Lily and James lay, bones now, surely, or dust, not knowing or caring that their living son stood so near, his heart still beating, alive because of their sacrifice and close to wishing, at this moment, that he was sleeping under the snow with them.
In our first Christmas with him, Harry is so entranced by an image in a mirror, a fantasy of living and healthy family, that he is tempted to waste away before it. In his last Christmas — alone, save for steadfast Hermione — he confronts two painful realities: first, that his parents are truly gone and nothing can bring them back; and second, that he’ll likely need to make the same sacrifice they did to save the chosen family that’s risen from their ashes.
And you thought your family Christmas drama was a pain.
Yes, Harry Potter is a Christmas story. After reviewing the evidence, I’m not sure it’s reasonable to arrive at any other conclusion. You can technically tell Harry’s story without Christmas; but we shouldn’t. The holiday makes a grand appearance in every book, and is an essential part of the storyline in each one. Like our Christmas traditions, the Harry Potter stories are familiar, cyclical, and reliable: one book per year, a festive interlude in the middle of each, catapulting us into an inevitable final act that tidily ties up that year’s tale, like a neatly-wrapped Christmas present.2
The Christmas themes of the books are so reliable that by the third or fourth book, we feel like we’re going home for the holidays when that time rolls around mid-book. And like Harry, we’re jolted from our complacency in the later books when Christmas doesn’t look the way it used to.
Harry and his world are as fantastical as they come; but their connection with the holidays are lovingly, painfully, cathartically of this world. After all, the magic that rescues Harry from his past isn’t found in any spellbook, or even from one of Hermione’s trips to the library; it’s written on the walls of the home he finds safety in, and on the hearts of the family who loves him for who he’s grown to be.
May you find that magic yourself this week. See you next year.
Sorry, Ginny Weasley. Sorry also to “Dumbledore asked calmly.”
The professor in me finds it suspiciously convenient that Harry’s death-defying exploits always seem to occur right before final exams. Like, really? He couldn’t get his heroics done over spring break?
Happy Christmas, Charlie!
This was beautiful thank you so much