Christmas Coloring Pages

December is when kids ask for something new to color every day. Free Christmas coloring pages can fill the whole season, from a single bell a toddler can finish before snack time to a fireplace hung with stockings that keeps an adult busy all evening. The outlines are dark and clean, so they come out fine even on a printer nobody has touched since last year.

The Christmas drawings fall into a handful of groups:

• Christmas trees with ornaments, candles, stars and presents underneath, indoors and out in the snow.
• Santa Claus with his sack of toys and with a toy train, plus reindeer pulling sleighs full of presents.
• Snowmen, penguins and a kitten in a stocking.
• Gingerbread houses and a gingerbread man in a bow tie.
• Fireplaces and stockings, wreaths, bells, candles and piles of wrapped presents.
• Carol singers in a snowy street and a nativity scene.

Away from the decorations, a boy goes ice skating in a hat, scarf and gloves, with snowflakes swirling around him. For more of the season beyond the holiday itself, the winter coloring pages carry on into January.

Christmas tree coloring pages

The Christmas tree comes back again and again in the collection: topped with stars, lit with candles, standing in a snowy clearing with snowflakes falling, and decorated by a reindeer and two squirrels working together. Every ornament is outlined on its own, so each one can take its own color.

Coloring Christmas ornaments that shine

• Pick three ornament colors and rotate them around the tree. It looks planned rather than spotty.
• Gold is a yellow pencil with a touch of light orange on one side.
• Leave a small white dot on each ornament. It reads as a reflection.
• Presents have separate paper, ribbon and bow, a good place for a child who is tired of green.

On a snowy page, color the sky pale blue and leave the snow as bare paper. White pencil on white paper does almost nothing.

Where the decorated tree came from

The decorated tree is a German custom. It became fashionable in Britain after the Illustrated London News printed an engraving of Queen Victoria and Prince Albert's family around their tree at Windsor in 1848. Two years later an American magazine, Godey's Lady's Book, ran a copy with the royal details removed, and the idea spread across the United States.

The first glass baubles were blown in Lauscha, a glassmaking town in Germany, in the 1840s, shaped like fruit and nuts. The glass ball a child colors on a tree is a custom less than two hundred years old.

Santa, reindeer and sleigh coloring pages

Santa Claus holds a sack of toys among snowflakes and holly, and shows off a toy train in another scene. The reindeer get a page of their own pulling a sleigh full of ornaments, and teams of two and three reindeer haul sleighs piled with presents.

The classic Santa palette is short:

• Suit and hat: bright red, with white fur trim left as bare paper.
• Belt and boots: black, with a yellow or gold buckle.
• Beard: white paper with a light gray line here and there for curls.
• Reindeer: warm brown, a lighter tan on the belly, and a red nose if one of them happens to be Rudolph.

For Santa going down chimneys and loading the sleigh, the Santa coloring pages go much further. The little elf who moves around the house each night, tangled in tree lights or hiding among the ornaments, has his own Elf on the Shelf coloring pages.

Christmas animals: snowmen, penguins and a kitten

Some of the friendliest sheets in the set belong to animals and snow figures.

• Snowmen in top hats and scarves, one holding a bird, one leaning on a broom with two birds on its arms, one with a carrot nose next to a snow castle.
• Penguins, one in a Santa hat holding a gift, two more exchanging a present beside an igloo.
• A kitten sitting in a Christmas stocking with a candy cane and a teddy bear.

The kitten in the stocking is the one cat lovers ask for. The kitten coloring pages also have a kitten putting the star on a tree and another in a Santa hat hugging a present. Snowman fans will find a whole season of them, from the first snowball to the thaw, in the snowman coloring pages.

Simple Christmas coloring pages for toddlers and preschool

For the youngest, choose one object with thick outlines and plenty of white around it. The bell with its bow, the two lit candles and the gingerbread man in the snow are the kind of page that Quick to color gathers at the top of the grid.

• A Christmas bell with a bow and holly leaves
• A snowman beside a snow castle
• Two lit candles with melting wax

A preschool class can take one each and hang them on a string across the classroom window. The finished row looks like a garland, and nobody had to color a tree full of tiny ornaments.

The gingerbread sheets belong here too, since the man is quick and the houses are a step up. For iced cottages and cooling racks, the gingerbread coloring pages take that idea much further.

Christmas coloring pages for adults

At the other end, the fireplaces, the gingerbread houses under the moon and the carol singers in a snowy street are full of small areas. Stockings, candy trim and snowy rooftops leave many tiny spaces, and those crowded scenes are the ones Lots of detail collects.

• A Christmas tree hung with striped baubles
• Christmas stockings hanging by a fireplace
• A gingerbread house with a chimney

These are the adult Christmas coloring pages: a sharp set of colored pencils does better than markers in the tight corners, and the best colored pencils guide compares sets. For quieter winter interiors to color long after the decorations come down, see the cozy coloring pages and the adult coloring pages.

A nativity scene for Sunday school

The nativity shows Mary, Joseph and baby Jesus in the manger under the star, drawn with big shapes so a young class can manage it. Tradition gives Mary a blue robe, Joseph brown, and the star yellow, but the page works in any colors.

The nativity scene as a Christmas custom is usually traced to Francis of Assisi, who set one up with real people and live animals in the Italian village of Greccio in 1223.

For a church craft table, pair it with the Jesus coloring pages and the angel coloring pages.

Hello Kitty, Bluey and Stitch Christmas coloring pages

Many children search for a favorite character in a Santa hat, and those holiday drawings are kept with the character rather than here:

• Hello Kitty hangs baubles on the tree and holds a present under MERRY CHRISTMAS among her own Hello Kitty sheets.
• Chase and Skye reach up to put the star on a little tree, a scene from the Paw Patrol collection.
• Bluey hangs a bauble and builds a snowman in the Bluey coloring pages.
• Stitch, in a reindeer headband beside a small tree, is part of the Stitch coloring pages.

All of them can go into the same print as the sheets on this page, as the next section shows.

Christmas cards, an advent countdown and a coloring book

To make a card, fold an A4 or Letter sheet in half twice, and it fits a standard envelope. The single-object sheets work best at that size: the bell, the wreath of holly and pine cones, the candles. Write Merry Christmas in the sky in pencil, trace it in marker, then color. Card stock holds the fold better than copy paper.

For an advent countdown, collect a drawing for each day:

1. Press Add to pack beneath each drawing you want, from any collection.
2. Download everything as one PDF and print the lot.
3. From December 1, hand out a fresh page each evening, easy ones on school nights.

The same pack, stapled at the corner, becomes a small Christmas coloring book for a stocking or a long drive to relatives. At Christmas dinner, a colored page inside a plastic report cover protects the kids' table from the gravy.

When the season moves on, the New Year's coloring pages and the wider set of holiday coloring pages carry on through the dates that follow.

Getting Christmas sheets printed before the rush

Teachers who print in the first days of December skip the last-week queue at the school copier. The PDFs are A4 at 300 dpi. A4 paper takes them as they are, while a Letter printer wants fit to page ticked so the star on the treetop stays on the sheet.

For cards on card stock, feed the printer by hand if it has a manual tray, and gather the class set into one file with Add to pack first. Each setting is pictured in the printing guide. Home, classroom, church and party use costs nothing, and every drawing was made for this site.