So far this item has taken the longest to complete, start to finish time! We just watched the 8th and last movie in the series last Friday night. We had started the first one……in May!

This is my second time watching the series; the first time was when I first moved to Idaho during a brutal winter (known locally as “snowmageddon”) in 2016. However I have the memory retention of a goldfish when it comes to movies sometimes, so it was almost like watching some of the movies for the first time again haha.

I have read the entire book series before as well, years ago. But despite that, I still had no clue what was going to happen from the Goblet of Fire on.

The first two – Sorcerer’s Stone and Chamber of Secrets – are so cute and innocent. They are so dramatically different from the characters and plot in Half Blood Prince and Deathly Hallows. It’s almost unbelievable that they are part of the same series! Once Cedric dies in the fourth movie, it’s like the whole mood shifts and then entire story darkens, and the death never stops coming.

Spoiler alert ahead!

I absolutely could not believe that Dumbledore really died. I thought “he has to be coming back! He has to have lived!” That was shocking to me. I also was stunned when Snape also really died. Then in the final battle, finding out that Lupin and one of the Weasley twins dies – it was so sad! Little did we know during the cute scenes of movies 1 &2 what a dark ending we were in for. I could not have predicted that’s where it would turn from the beginning.

I did enjoy the fact that it concluded with the “19 years later” look at Harry, Ron and Hermione with their own small children.

We liked watching the movies on dreary cloudy days and making big bowls of popcorn or kettle corn.

The Harry Potter series is a classic and I plan on reading through the books with my own kids when they are old enough. Although now rewatching it myself, I’m not sure exactly what age that is.

There are a couple other cult-classic series that I’ve never seen before, like Star Wars or Lord of the Rings but I just don’t have any desire to right now. Maybe I’ll add them to a future milestone bucket list…