In the Halloween Spirit

So I have to admit, our house is not very spirited this year. See, when we started building our house, we thought we would be moved before Halloween. So....I packed up all of our Halloween stuff and it's not buried in the back of our POD in the driveway. Needless to say, I'm not about to go out there and unbury it for just one day and then have to pack it back up again. It was bad enough that I had to send Gabe out there hunting for Avery's costume that was packed up! Because of this, I don't even know if we'll carve pumpkins this year-I know the carving set is packed away as well.

Since it's a gloomy day out here today, I decided Avery and I would do some Halloween stuff. I did a quick search online for easy crafts and actually had some stuff in my house I could use to make something!

Craft #1: Coffee Filter Ghosts

What you'll need: scissors, string, a coffee filter, a black marker, tinfoil and tape.
Lay out a piece of tinfoil flat on the table and tape a piece of string (whatever length you want the ghost to hang from) in the middle of the foil.


Crumple the foil up into a ball:

Take your coffee filter and draw on a ghost face:

Poke a hole in the top of the coffee filter and thread through the string-the coffee filter will rest on top of the tinfoil:

Display them around your house! (Please ignore the ugly chandelier we have-and yes, it's missing lights!)

Just a note-you're supposed to use a regular coffee filter, but my coffee maker takes the cone shaped filters-they still worked out just fine!

Craft #2: Handprint ghosts

What you'll need: white paper, scissors, a black marker, a pencil

Trace your child's hand on a piece of white paper. Using scissors, cut out the handprint making the wrist area rounded (for the ghost's head). Draw on a ghost face!

Here's Avery posing with her ghost:

The finished handprint ghost!

She really got a kick out of this one. Lately she loves tracing her hands so we made 3 of these in no time. She colored in two of them and I did this one. We hung them on our front door and she loves them!

Boo!

There's one other thing we're doing to get into the spirit of things around here. It's called getting Boo-ed! I saw this idea on another blog and thought it sounded like so much fun!

You start by printing out a few copies of this. You put a copy into a bag of treats that you assemble. Then you deliver the treats anonymously to your neighbors without them knowing (basically a ding-dong ditch type of thing). They put the ghost sign up in their window so that others know they have been boo-ed and then they continue on the fun! The idea is to see how many houses can get boo-ed by Halloween.

I delivered the first bag back on Sunday hoping the neighbors would participate. I saw the sign go up on their door so I was hopeful. Unfortunately I haven't seen any other signs going up, so I don't know if they followed the instructions or if they did follow them and our other neighbors are party poopers. So, I put together 2 more bags to deliver tonight to see what happens.

These are just a few things we're doing here to get into the spirit of Halloween. Tell me, what are you doing to gear up for the holiday? I'd love to hear your ideas!