Adorable Halloween Footprint Ghosts to Celebrate Halloween

Inside: Celebrate Halloween with these Halloween Footprint Ghosts crafts you can make with your kids to showcase just how small their feet are this year.

The days are getting shorter and the air is getting crisper and that can only mean one thing for my kids.

Halloween.

They’re on full countdown mode till their 2nd favorite holiday where they can trick or treat and get as much candy as possible.

And my kids are begging me to get down the Halloween boxes out of the rafters so we can Halloween up our home, filling our tables with teal pumpkins for my food allergy kiddo, mummies, and a skeleton cat that dances to the Monster Mash.

And while those decorations are some of my kids’ favorites, my favorites are the decorations that take a snapshot of our lives each year.

For that, I love handprint and footprint art.

We’ve turned our hands into spiders and turkeys and reindeer, but my favorite one is this Trick or Treat Halloween Footprint Ghost.

Why we should create handprint and footprint art:

Kid-made Halloween decorations like this Halloween sewing craft are always sweet and fun and this Halloween Pointillism craft.

But I love footprint and handprint art the most for one reason: our kids grow too darn fast.

Every parent can agree with that one.

So taking the time to create handprint or footprint art is a snapshot of this moment.

It’s pausing time for a second and capturing the size of their little hand or their foot before they grow yet another size larger.

And as a parent of kids who grow like weeds, I love looking back and seeing how my kids’ little hands used to fit into mine or how tiny their feet were before they became unbearably stinky all the time.

Handprint and footprint art becomes more of a decoration.

It becomes a piece of your child’s past.

Okay, enough sap.

Here’s how we made our Halloween Footprint Ghosts:

Supplies Needed for our Halloween Footprint Ghost:

How to Make a Footprint Ghost:

1. While your child sits, paint the bottom of his or her foot with white washable paint.

2. Put the orange paper on the floor and help your child stand and balance on their non-painted foot.

3. Place your child’s painted foot on the construction paper and have them press down firmly. Rub each toe to make sure the paint transfers.

4. Lift your child up and carry them to the sink to wash off their foot, or use wipes to get the paint off.

5. Repeat the steps with each of your children.

6. If your child is a little older and has raised arches already in their feet (and therefore a hollow in their ghost’s body), you can fill it in with white paint or leave it as is.

7. When the white paint has dried, dip the end of the paintbrush in the black paint and dot two eyes on the heel of the ghost print.

8. To celebrate the best part of Halloween for most kids, Trick or Treating, write, (or if your child can write, have them copy,) “Trick or Treat, Smell My Feet” on the paper with a pencil.

Then you can trace their writing with a black sharpie.

If you put more than one child’s foot on your construction paper, you can write, “Trick or Treat, Smell Our Feet.”

9. Date their footprint ghosts and write their names next to their prints so you can remember this moment, and the smallness of their feet on future Halloweens.

I usually make several copies of these ghost footprints and give them to grandparents to hang in their kitchens.

Here’s to another Happy Halloween and a trick or treat season that results in full bags of candy.