The first Den Challenge of the year pretty much always ends up having unpredictable consequences. Remember last year and the shop thingy? Firery Books of Fire and Wand Wands were sold on the Gryffindor black markets for months afterwards, even though no one seemed to know if the mentioned items had a practical purpose of existence to speak of besides looking indescribably fascinating. And the year before that and the reason lists, the four Dens came up with over 2,000 reasons for the most random topics ever thought of and we still haven't full recovered from the damage to our parchment supply. Well, this year has proven to be... Wait, an exception? D:

Nah, not really. The idea this September, brought to us by the amazing Ilona Littrell, was to create a passport for each Den's summer travels and, obviously, Gryffs wouldn't be Gryffs if they hadn't exploited the opportunity to go nuts creatively! After a month of hard work, excessive useage of paint, scissors and glue (-especially- glue, people got glued to floors and ceilings, Ronja Liek spent two days in a broomcloset, because someone had accidentally glued to door stuck, Kate Potter mistook a bottle of butterbeer for glue and poured it all over her Den's passport... Seriously, you wouldn't believe the chaos) and constantly redefining insanity (the final definition we decided upon was that „Insanity is using cheesecake to glue a photo to a passport page over and over again and expecting it to stick"), the Den to survive as winners was Burgundy Butterbeer, leaving Fuchsia Firewishkey and Garnet Gillywater to second and third place respectively.

The Butterbeers did indeed deserve to win. Their passport contained as many as approximately 68.23 pages and included so much delightfully varied information about their summer adventures - from an overview of both the Summer Camp and the Z-Wars to Butterbeer Mottos, Boetry and an exclusive confession by a (now former?) Fuchsia Firewishkey Den member on his attraction to butterbeer. ... Not to forget the actual member passports, of course. Barbara Phoenix did falsely accuse me of being an obsessing butterbeer hoarder and imprisoning her in Svalbard, but that can be forgiven, at least considering the general hilarity of their entry.

Fuchsia Firewhiskey and Garnet Gillywater didn't stay too far behind either, although their approach was a little different. The FFs concentrated on Zee's unhealthy Twilight obsession their trip to Forks and how they kept running into a certain mister Cullen, but it wasn't all there was to their passport. They mentioned motto voting, their Den poltergeist (who takes the most interesting form of a pink elephant and apparently never shows up alone) and had wonderful individual member passport pages. The Gillywater Den again HAD WIZARD ROCK ZMOG talked about blue unibrows, flying snow carpets and how Elganorus Oakbark returned to his duties as the Lord of the Chocolate Frogs.

...

*cough*

Well, see? There is something up with the month of September. I'm not sure what it is, but I'm convinced there has to be a reason for the chaos that always ensues to SPD people posting the first Den assignment of the year. Is it the approaching Gryfftoberfest? Is it the excess energy from GSC? Seagulls? The world will probably never know.

In any case, congratulations to all Gryffindors who participated and good luck for the November challenge!