PoA was my fav until ORDER. I need to reread them all to figure out which is my overall fav

I just caught up with the last ten days of posting here and want to give Nilly a big virtual hug for making me love her more every single time she posts.

:: piles on making it a group hug! ::

She made me appreciate what I read, all the more!

And yet there are special wizarding fairy tales. You'd think that there would be wizarding kids adventure stories

Isn't there some reference to a book called something like The Adventures of Martin Miggs, the Mad Muggle? Or have I imagined that? (Possibly lying around Ron's room at the burrow? ...or is it a comic strip in The Prophet ?) I just remember being delighted with the notion - up there with all Mr Weasley's gleeful misunderstanding of Muggle ingenuity, and that exchange between Ron and Harry when they first meet on the train, which I'll paraphrase here:

Harry: Wow! So all your family are wizards?

Ron: Well, I think my Mum's got a cousin who's an accountant, but we never mention him.

Loved that.

So then does each person open presents in his or her bedroom, or do they bring them to a common area so everyone can open them together? I'm trying to remember how they did it at the Burrow during the Christmas scenes we've seen there -- I think I remember Harry and Ron opening their presents in their bedroom, and Ginny and Hermione and the twins coming in to show them what they got, and everyone else discussing it at the kitchen table.

It's not like there's a hard and fast rule.

When I was little, I used to get some presents at the bottom of the bed which were from Santa, and which I'd open gleefully as soon as I was conscious. And then there were other presents under the tree that were from people to each other. And we'd open those in the afternoon, after we'd had Christmas Dinner (which is to say, lunch).

As nobody in my family believes in Santa these days, we just pile our pressies under the tree and open them after lunch.

This mornng, GF said "Harry Potter must not return to Hogwarts!" in Dobby-voice. She then said she loves Dobby in the books but hated him in the movies. Then she asked if Dobby is in the latest book. Sob! She is starting the book today.

Right, I always saw the presents at the end of the bed as equivalent to the presents under the tree from Santa. (in my house, there were always fun presents unwrapped under the tree that were from Santa and we would have wrapped presents from people.)

Some of our wrapped presents under the tree were from Santa and the stocking gifts were always from Santa.

oh, and stockings too. stocking were from Santa.

When I announced that I no longer believed in Santa, we stopped getting presents from him. (I was the youngest, and thus the last to believe.) We still got presents from the elves, Mrs. Claus, reindeer, etc., but not Santa. We got gifts from all sorts of other people, too -- the Supreme Court justices' names often appear on mine, and my sisters will get things from famous people related to their professions. We also get them from people whose identities supply a hint about what's inside. My DH got something from John L. Sullivan once that turned out to be a pair of silk boxer shorts -- I'm blanking on others right now, but my father is the best at coming up with names for gifts.

Er, as for Harry Potter, I bought myself the CD set and have been listening to Jim Dale read me the story all over again. I can't wait to get to the Battle of Hogwarts, but I'll no more skip ahead with the spoken word book than I would the printed word book.

What would William Gibson's be?

Harry Potter Overdrive

or

Potter Recognition