‘Twas the day before Thanksgiving and without a doubt
I was the most happy creature about
Technically, Magic Wednesday has only existed for nine years. But the magic started ten years ago.
Ten years ago I was twelve years old and in the sixth grade. The very first Harry Potter movie had just come out and we thought it would be fun to go see it on the day before Thanksgiving after we picked up our relatives from the airport.
That would have been only a couple of months after 9/11, so it would have been the first year we had to wait outside of security instead of going right up to the gate, but I don’t remember that. What I do remember is my dad asking my aunt and grandpa if they’d had any lunch yet. They said they hadn’t, so we stopped at the co-op on the way home to get some sandwiches.
That’s where I found my scarf. It wasn’t that special. It was just a fuzzy black scarf. But I must’ve worn it every day of every winter for the next five years, because it reminded me of that wonderful day.
I don’t remember much else from that year, but one memory stands out as one of the happiest of my life. As we walked up the sidewalk toward the movie theater, I grabbed my little brother’s hand and we ran the rest of the way, giggling. That one moment of pure childhood glory sums up everything Magic Wednesday is to me.
The next year, I knew it was coming. The second Harry Potter movie had just come out and we would go to see it at the same theater, just like we had the year before. I counted the days. I wrote in my diary about how excited I was. At school on Wednesday I counted the minutes of each shortened class period until early release at noon.
That was what we all remember as the “original” Magic Wednesday. It was the first year I called it that. And it was a wonderful day. I couldn’t have asked for anything better. We went to the airport, we saw Harry Potter, we went out to eat. A tradition had been born.
But traditions can be problematic. The next year, 2003, was the “ill-fated” Magic Wednesday. We spent endless hours arguing over what movie to see (and despite my steel trap mind, I’ve forgotten what we eventually decided on). My brother got sick. By the time the day ended, I was forced to admit that it hadn’t been just like last year, as I had wanted it to be. It hadn’t even been very good. But there was one good thing: That was the first year I wrote a Magic Wednesday poem.
2004 was much better. Nobody got sick, we had a much better choice of movies, it was wonderful. But it just didn’t feel “magic.” That was the year I realized that the magic of the first two years wasn’t something I could create. It just, as I put it in the next poem, “happened that way.”
In 2005 we faced our first Magic Wednesday with no relatives coming to visit. That’s also when the memories start to blur a little bit. That might have been the year that we drove all around town after school buying supplies for my sister’s new guinea pig, but I’m not 100% sure. I think that was also the year they opened the downtown movie theater, which I railed against endlessly for intruding on the space of the theater we’d gone to on the first two Magic Wednesdays, but then came to think was pretty cool.
After that I really don’t remember the details of any specific Magic Wednesday. Sometimes there was a Harry Potter movie to see, sometimes there wasn’t. Sometimes it was awesome, sometimes it kind of stank. One year we saw a play instead of a movie. One year we had to have “Magic Friday” instead because everyone’s planes got delayed until late Wednesday night. But there was never another one like the first two, for the reason I’ve already mentioned. Magic just happens.
But Magic Wednesday reminds me that it does happen, and no matter how bad things get, it will happen again someday. Magic Wednesday was an ordinary day that became extraordinary because a twelve-year-old girl decided it would be. Magic can’t be created, but it can be found, even in the most unlikely places, if you look hard enough.
Yes nothing can send my happiness away
On this the most wonderful and Magic Wednesday
