Gingerbread Coloring Pages

Gingerbread is the one Christmas subject that is already the right shape for coloring. A cookie is a flat outline with icing piped on it, which is to say it is a coloring page before anyone draws it. These free printable gingerbread coloring pages lean on that: scalloped roof tiles, piped edges, gumdrops, swirled lollipops and dots of icing, all of it drawn as separate small areas waiting for a pencil.

The set runs from the dough to the finished thing. Shapes on a baking tray between two rolling pins. Cutters pressed into a rolled sheet with two men already lifted out. A piping bag drawing icing onto hearts, stars and trees on a wire cooling rack. A boy in an apron piping tiles onto a roof with bowls of sweets beside him. And then the houses, the castle, the carousel and the village street.

The one thing to say before anyone starts

Leave the icing as bare paper. It is the whole difference between a gingerbread sheet that works and one that does not.

• Cookie: a warm mid-brown, pressed a little harder around the edges where it browned in the oven.
• Icing: bare white paper, untouched. A white pencil over white paper only makes it gray.
• Sweets: this is where the color goes. Gumdrops, lollipops and buttons in strong flat colors, as many as you like, because that is what a decorated cookie actually looks like.
• Snow on roofs and paths: also bare paper, with the faintest blue in the hollows if you want shape.
• Skies go deep blue or gray. The cookies are warm and pale, and a dark sky is what lifts them off the page.

The single cookies, and the scenes around them

Press Quick to color above the grid: biggest shapes only, and the fastest sheet leads.

• A cookie man perched on a mug
• A cookie bear with icing ears
• A cookie reindeer with tall antlers

Those are the single cookies: a man with three buttons and a ruffled collar, a round bear with icing ears, a reindeer with branching antlers. They are the ones to print for a nursery table or to cut out and hang.

For slightly older children, the scenes: a cookie man on ice skates with snowflakes around him, another perched on the rim of a mug with marshmallows floating in it, one startled with a string of fairy lights wound around his arms and legs, and one swinging himself out of an open oven door.

Cutting out, hanging up, and the week before

Printed on 120 to 160 gsm card, the single cookies cut out cleanly along the outline and hang on a tree with a loop of thread. A tiered stand sheet and a carousel sheet are drawn for the same purpose: color, cut, and stand them up.

For a class the week before the holidays, print three or four different sheets rather than thirty copies of one, and print early. Everyone wants the copier in the same week.

From the page to the baking tray

This is the one subject where the drawing can be used as a plan, and children take the idea seriously.

Color the cutter sheet first, then bake the shapes it shows. A page of stars, hearts and little men decided in pencil in the morning is a tray of real biscuits by the afternoon, and the child who chose the icing colors on paper will ice the real ones the same way. It works in the other direction too: bake first, then color the sheet to match what came out of the oven.

The house sheets make a paper trial run for the real thing. Print the cut-away cottage, let a child decide where the gumdrops go, and build the real house to that plan rather than arguing about it with icing in one hand.

Away from the kitchen: the single cookies cut out along the outline, with a loop of thread taped behind, hang on a tree and last for years, which a real gingerbread man does not. A colored man glued to the front of a folded card is the Christmas card that gets kept. And the tiered stand sheet, cut into its three layers and glued to card with a ring of paper between each, actually stands up.

For the rest of December, the Christmas coloring pages and the santa coloring pages go in the same pack, and the winter coloring pages carry on into January.

Why gingerbread became a Christmas thing

Ginger is not European, and that is the whole story.

It came along the spice routes from Asia and was expensive enough through the Middle Ages that a spiced cake was a luxury, saved for feast days. Monasteries baked it. By the 1400s German towns had guilds of gingerbread bakers, and Nuremberg's Lebkuchen was regulated like any other trade, which is why the decorated, piped style on these pages looks so formal: it was professional work.

Gingerbread was also pressed into carved wooden moulds showing saints, kings and animals, which is where the idea of a gingerbread figure comes from. Elizabeth I is credited with having gingerbread men made to resemble visiting dignitaries.

The gingerbread house is later and almost certainly follows the Brothers Grimm publishing Hansel and Gretel in 1812. German bakers built them, the story sold them, and they have been a December fixture since.

Practically, the dough is stiff and holds an edge, which is why it is used for building and why the cutters in this collection have such clean shapes. It also keeps for months, which is how a decorated house survives on a sideboard until January.

The slow ones, for a December evening

Lots of detail does the reverse, and the first sheet it shows is the most crowded in the collection.

• Piping icing onto a cooling rack
• An iced cottage with a tiled roof
• A cottage with a gumdrop path

The village street is the one to keep for an evening: tall cookie houses leaning over a snowy road, snow heaped on every roof and sill, with a few hundred separate iced shapes to fill. The market stall and the cut-away house are close behind. A narrow palette works better than a wide one here: two browns, three sweet colors, and everything white left as paper.

The Christmas coloring pages hold the rest of December, and the santa coloring pages go in the same pack.

Each sheet is a free A4 PDF at 300 dpi, with no sign-up. Print at 100 % scale on A4, or "fit to page" on US Letter; the printing guide covers paper and settings. Press Add to pack under the sheets you want and print the selection as one PDF.