What she says: i'm fine
What she means: In Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows (2007), Narcissa Malfoy tells Fenrir Greyback and the other snatchers that, 'My son, Draco, is home for the Easter holidays' (p. 370). While the Easter holidays are mentioned in the previous books, this is the first indication we ever get that the students have the option to return home for the break. Are we therefore to assume that nobody in Harry's (the narrator's) orbit had, in their six years at Hogwarts, opted to return home for the holidays? In Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix (2003), Harry, Ron, Hermione and Ginny are explicitly stated to be at Hogwarts during the Easter holidays (p. 547); seeming this is fairly recently after Arthur being attacked by Nagini at Christmas, you'd think if, had they had the option, the Weasley children would want to return home to see their parents. Should we therefore extrapolate from Draco returning home for Easter in 1998 that this was a recent change in Hogwarts policy to allow students to leave the castle for the break? Would Severus Snape, while trying to maintain his facade of Voldemort's puppet head master, have had the time and the interest in altering school policy to grant students the option of returning home at Easter? Why would Snape care whether or not kids could go home at Easter? Perhaps, therefore, that Draco's need to be home for Easter was only for plot purposes and not something JK Rowling had considered before reaching that point in the seventh book. Draco's presence at Malfoy Manor in this chapter becomes significant as it helps to confirm for the snatchers that they have captured Harry Potter, but it also foreshadows Draco's resignations about Voldemort's regime and demonstrates his reluctance to hand over Harry, Ron and Hermione to the Death Eaters. However, if she had devised the concept of returning home for Easter holidays solely for the purpose of having Draco present at Malfoy Manor when the snatches catch Harry, then why wouldn't she have prefaced this my mentioning this asset of the Easter holidays earlier? She seems to plan things very far ahead (eg Slytherin's locket being handled in the fifth book), so why wouldn't she have planned this? However, perhaps returning home for the Easter holidays is not part of school policy but something Draco elected to do himself. By Deathly Hallows, he would have been seventeen and perhaps the school did not have the authority from preventing of-age students from leaving the castle.
