Handprint Reindeer Cards
A hand, upside down, is a reindeer. Nobody sees it until you show them.
- Age
- Ages 2–7
- Prep
- 5 min
- Play time
- 15 min
- Mess
- Medium
- Difficulty
- Easy
- Where
- Indoor
Why kids love this
The reveal is the whole thing. A palm print with the fingers spread looks like nothing at all until you turn the paper round and add two eyes  and then it is unmistakably a reindeer, and they want to make eleven more. It is also one of the few crafts where the child's own hand is the material, which means every single one is different and none of them can be got wrong.
What you'll need
- Brown paint
- Card or thick paper, folded
- A paintbrush or a paper plate for the paint
- A red pom-pom or red paint for the nose
- Googly eyes or a black pen
- Glue
How to do it
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Fold the card and lay it flat with the fold at the top.
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Paint the child's palm and fingers brown  a brush is less alarming than dipping the hand in a plate.
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Press the hand onto the front of the card with the fingers pointing down, then lift it straight up rather than dragging.
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When it is dry, turn the card so the fingers point up. Those are the antlers.
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Glue on the eyes and the red nose, and write the message inside.
Make it easier
Press their hand yourself, holding it flat at the wrist. Small children curl their fingers at the moment of contact and lose the antlers.
Make it harder
Ask them to plan the whole card first  where the message goes, how much room the antlers need  and then print. Composition is the hard part and it is invisible until you skip it.
Other ways to play it
- Two hands overlapping make a much grander set of antlers.
- A white handprint on dark card is a snowflake rather than a reindeer, and works for anybody who does not mark Christmas.
- Keep one card back each year and write the age on it.
What they're learning
Whole-hand printing builds the shoulder and wrist stability that handwriting later depends on. Recognising a hand as a reindeer is early symbolic thinking  the same skill that lets a box become a boat.
Handprint cards are the Christmas activities for kids that relatives keep. A shop-bought card gets recycled in January; a card with a five-year-old's hand printed on it goes in a drawer and gets found again in fifteen years.
This is at the easy end of kids Christmas crafts  one colour of paint, one sheet of card, and about ten minutes including the drying. Good for a batch: set up once and make cards for the whole family in a single sitting.
The fingers are the antlers and the thumb is the ear, which is worth pointing out before you start, because a child who understands the plan presses much more deliberately.
As Christmas crafts for kids go it is unusually tolerant of very young children  most crafts for kids at two years old end in a torn page, and this one cannot, because the hand does the work. It is on our shortlist of easy Christmas crafts for kids precisely because there is no cutting, no waiting and nothing to get wrong.