Hot Topic’s #HousePrideSweeps

Day 5: My mad Quidditch skill! Chaser!

These are the first 5 of 14 of my son’s responses to Hot Topic’s #HousePrideSweeps that began on August 1 and completed today, August 14.

Each day, Hot Topic posted a different challenge; participants responded with an image on Instagram or Twitter with the hashtag House Pride Sweeps. To be eligible to win, participants had to submit a response to the challenge each day. From the rules:

A new photo should be uploaded each day pertaining to that day’s category. Entrants are required to find/source an image related to the category of the day. Hot Topic will announce the category of the day, every day during the Sweepstakes Period beginning August 1, 2015 at hottopic.com/HousePrideSweeps. Each upload to Instagram or Twitter should be accompanied by the hashtags #HousePrideSweeps. Each entrant must upload a photo each day pertaining to that day’s category. Photos must be uploaded on each day of the promotion for 14 consecutive days to be eligible to win.

As we only learned of the challenge on one of the final days, we scoured the fine print and found:

Alternate Method of Entry: Enter by mailing an envelope with your full name, full address (including state and zip code), a valid email address and your date of birth along with printed photographs of each category listed above to: “Harry Potter House Pride” Sweepstakes C/O Allied Experiential 6908 Hollywood Blvd 3rd Floor Los Angeles, CA 90046. Envelopes received without all fourteen photos will not be accepted. All mail-in entries must be postmarked no later than August 14th 2015, and received by August 20th, 2015.

As you can tell from this blog post and others if you have been a regular reader, my son is a huge Harry Potter fan ever since summer of 2011 when he started reading the series — as did I! We read them independently, but we talked about them often, and it was quite competitive too to see who would finish first! (He did!) When we would finish each book, then we’d watch the movie.

Sometime around then, we discovered Hot Topic, and it quickly became his favorite store. Almost every cent that crossed his hand was spent at Hot Topic, so when this competition turned up, he was very excited to participate–and had a few cool things from Hot Topic and elsewhere to use as props!

Also, this is his third summer attending a Wizardry and Literacy Theater Camp, and his first summer attending a Harry Potter themed “maker” camp in Berkeley at Curiousity Hacked Oakland where he made the Monster Book of Monsters shown above as well as a mandrake (that shrieks!), the Patronus lantern below, and much much more shown in the photo above of his house gear. (And yes the Harry Potter Hackwarts was definitely ahighlight of his summer –and his life!)

Day 6: House Pride Poster!

Day 7: House Quality–Bravery

Day 8: Who to duel: Snape 

Day 9: Head of House –Cat Woman McGonagal

For Day 10: My Favorite Character is Ron…

Day 13:

When we finally got everything done, it was a race to the Post Office –which closed before our noses! Fortunately, they have a self serve station that we could use and they guaranteed it would be postmarked.

As he was doing some finishing touches and getting the envelope properly addressed, I was reading the fine print to make sure we hadn’t missed anything when I saw that those who entered the sweepstakes had to be 13 or older! So at the last minute, it’s ME that is applying! Oh well –hopefully it will work out ok. Now I wish that I’d taken a photo of Reed depositing it!

Now we wait and see if he wins the grand prize which includes a laptop and house decor! Wish us luck!

Read more about the contest here.