New Year's Coloring Pages

New Year's Eve is the one night children are allowed to stay up, and most of them are asleep before midnight anyway. These New Year's coloring pages are for the hours before: something to do at the table while the adults talk, and something to hang up the next morning.

The fireworks come first: a giant burst over the New York skyline at midnight, children waving sparklers on a snowy balcony, bunnies in scarves watching from a snowy hill, an owl on a lamp post watching the colors reflect in a frozen pond, a horse-drawn sleigh crossing a town square under the bursts, a girl in a paper crown blowing a party horn at a window full of fireworks, and a snow globe that holds its own tiny village and fireworks show.

Then the party. A stack of party hats among curly streamers, a party blower unrolling, a confetti cannon in mid-burst, a disco ball over a dance floor, two glasses of sparkling cider beside a bowl of grapes, a tray of little cakes with sparkler candles, a pile of party favors, star sparklers in a jar on the porch, balloons tied to a garden gate, a rooftop strung with lights, a vase of branches wrapped in fairy lights, a pine and pinecone centerpiece, and a basket of ornaments tipped onto a rug. The animals join in: a cat in a party hat batting a balloon, a hedgehog hugging one almost as big as itself, a penguin sliding across the ice with a streamer in its beak, a fox leaping through confetti in the moonlight, a teddy bear tangled in streamers, a raccoon raiding the snacks under the table, and a dog who slept through the whole thing while confetti settled on its back. For quieter hands there are two mandalas, one of fireworks and one of bubbles and starbursts, a border of streamers and confetti, and a corner ornament of ribbons and bells.

Twelve grapes and other midnight customs

The bowl of grapes next to the glasses is a real tradition. In Spain, people eat twelve grapes at midnight, one on each stroke of the clock, for twelve lucky months, and it is much harder to do than it sounds. Other countries have their own habits: in Scotland the first visitor across the doorstep after midnight brings luck for the year, in Denmark people jump off a chair at midnight to leap into the new year, and in the United States a giant ball drops in Times Square, which is the city on the fireworks page.

Ask a child to invent a family custom for next year's midnight, draw it on the back of a page, and keep it for the following December.

Coloring fireworks on white paper

Fireworks are light in a dark sky, and a white page is the opposite. There are two ways to make them work.

The first is to color the sky dark: navy, deep purple or black around the bursts, leaving the lines of the fireworks white or coloring them in bright yellow, pink and green on top. Crayons or oil pastels press over dark marker well.

The second is to leave the sky white and color each burst from the center out: a hot color like yellow in the middle, then orange, then red or pink toward the tips. That gradient is how real fireworks look, and it needs no dark sky at all. Gold and silver gel pens, if there are any in the house, make any firework page look finished.

Before midnight and after

The quick pages keep one thing large on the page, a party blower, a penguin with a streamer, a fox jumping through confetti, and a child of three or four can finish them before the countdown. Quick to color, above the grid, starts with:

• Fox leaping through confetti
• Party blower unrolling
• Penguin sliding with a streamer

The detailed pages are the ones full of small shapes: the disco ball with its hundreds of mirror squares, the basket of patterned ornaments, the two mandalas. They make a good long page for an older child who is determined to stay up until midnight. Lots of detail opens on:

• Bubbles and starbursts mandala
• Disco ball over a dance floor
• Basket of ornaments on a rug

New Year around the world, hour by hour

Midnight arrives at a different time in every time zone, so New Year's Eve is really a whole day of countdowns. The first places to celebrate are the islands of Kiribati in the Pacific, and the last are the tiny American islands of Baker and Howland, about a day later. Sydney's harbor fireworks are usually the first big show on the news, and New York's ball drop comes many hours after. A family that can't stay up can celebrate with a time zone that has already reached midnight, at eight or nine in the evening, and color the city fireworks page for it.

A time capsule and a resolutions page

New Year's is a good moment to keep something. The streamer border has an open middle made for writing: each person in the family writes a wish or a resolution for the coming year inside it, signs it, and the page goes into an envelope marked "Open next December." A year later, it is always funnier than anyone expected.

The page of a child drawing at the kitchen table can start the same project for the youngest: draw your favorite thing from this year on the back, date it, and put it in the envelope too.

Printing for the countdown

Each design downloads as a free PDF at 300 dpi on an A4 layout. Use 100 % on A4; on US Letter tick "fit to page", which costs about six percent of the drawing and none of the sparkle. If the setting is hard to find, the printing guide points straight to it. Tap Add to pack on each page for your guests and print the whole stack in one go. The season continues in the winter coloring pages and the Christmas coloring pages.