Thanksgiving Coloring Pages

Most free Thanksgiving coloring pages start with a turkey's fanned tail, every feather a space of its own. This set does too, then builds the rest of the day around it: the pies, the cornucopia, the harvest and the table. They print as PDFs, from a smiling turkey a preschooler finishes before dinner to busy scenes for the grown-ups waiting on the oven.

Around the table and beyond it, the November sheets show:

• Turkeys: standing proud with feathers spread wide, smiling between pumpkins, posing with a bundle of wheat, poking out of a pie dish, and floating as a giant parade balloon over a crowd of children.
• The Thanksgiving table: a roasted turkey with mashed potatoes and bread, a family sharing the meal, a boy and a girl smiling over their plates.
• Pies and food: an apple pie with a lattice crust, a smiling slice of pie, a basket of fruits and vegetables.
• Cornucopias spilling pumpkins, grapes, corn and nuts.
• Pilgrim children: a boy in a pilgrim hat holding a pumpkin, and a girl in a pilgrim dress with a basket of apples.
• The harvest: a corn stalk with two ears, pumpkins and gourds under the stars, a pumpkin wreath and a little pumpkin house with a chimney.

One forest scene skips the people entirely: a squirrel and an owl share a picnic among the trees. Animal lovers can keep going with the squirrel coloring pages and the owl coloring pages.

Thanksgiving turkey coloring pages and how to color the tail

A turkey's fanned tail suits a child with a box of crayons, since every feather is a closed area of its own. The Thanksgiving turkey comes back in many poses here, and two ways of coloring it work.

A real wild turkey

• Body and tail: bronze and dark brown, with a coppery shine. Color each feather light brown, then press harder with dark brown across the tips.
• Head and neck: bare skin in blue and red, with the red wattle hanging under the beak.
• Legs: a pinkish gray.

A rainbow turkey

Children often go for rainbow tails, and those are the pages that get noticed on a classroom wall. Alternate a warm color and a cool one from feather to feather, so the fan stays readable from across the room.

A roasted turkey on a plate takes a golden yellow-orange base, warm brown along the top, and a thin strip of paper left white where the light hits. For turkeys out on the farm, roosting, dust bathing and crossing snowy fields, see the turkey coloring pages.

Thanksgiving dinner coloring pages: the table, the pie and the cornucopia

The Thanksgiving dinner sheets go from a single slice of pie to a whole family around a big roasted turkey. The boy and the girl at the table, with a turkey, mashed potatoes and a glass of milk in front of them, suit two kids coloring side by side.

Much of what sits on these tables is native to the Americas: turkey, corn, squash, pumpkins, beans, cranberries and sweet potatoes were grown or gathered there long before European settlers arrived. The apples in the lattice pie and the wheat behind the turkeys came across the Atlantic. The apple coloring pages and the food coloring pages fill out a menu.

The cornucopia is far older than the holiday. In Greek myth it is the horn of the goat Amalthea, which overflowed with food, and it has stood for plenty in Western art ever since. To make the horn look woven, give each band a light tan and add a darker brown where it tucks under the next one. The fruit coloring pages have more grapes, pears and apples to spill out of it.

The story behind Thanksgiving, for the classroom

The holiday looks back to a harvest celebration in 1621 at Plymouth Colony, where the English settlers and the Wampanoag people, led by Massasoit, ate together over several days. The pilgrim children on these sheets come from that story. Their clothes were less black and white than the classic picture suggests: browns, greens, muted reds and violet were all worn, so a child can color the pilgrim dress in any earthy shade.

For two centuries after that, states held their own thanksgiving days. Abraham Lincoln proclaimed a national Thanksgiving in 1863, after years of letters from the magazine editor Sarah Josepha Hale, and Congress fixed it on the fourth Thursday of November in 1941. Canada celebrates its own Thanksgiving on the second Monday of October.

The parade balloon

The giant turkey balloon over the sidewalk belongs to that other tradition, the parade. Macy's in New York held its first Thanksgiving parade in 1924, and the giant balloons arrived in 1927, led by Felix the Cat.

Simple Thanksgiving pages for the kids' table

For the youngest, pick a sheet with one big subject and thick outlines: the happy turkey between pumpkins, the boy holding a pumpkin, the pumpkin wreath, the smiling slice of pie. The Quick to color button gathers those chunky turkeys and pumpkins at the start of the grid:

• Smiling slice of pumpkin pie
• Pumpkin pie slice and holiday dishes
• Autumn wreath with pumpkins and acorns

Print them the night before and stack them next to a cup of crayons on the kids' table. While the potatoes boil, each child can work through a small stack, and the easy ones get finished before the rolls come out. For a preschool class the week before the break, the preschool coloring pages round out the stack.

Adult Thanksgiving coloring pages

The parade balloon above the crowd, the family dinner, the basket of fruits and vegetables and the pumpkin house are crowded with feathers, leaves and faces. Switch to Lots of detail to see that end of the harvest first:

• Harvest basket of corn and apples
• Children with a turkey parade balloon
• A pumpkin house with a chimney

These are the adult Thanksgiving coloring pages, for the relatives sent out of the kitchen. Keep the palette to browns, deep reds, mustard and orange and the page hangs together; a single bright blue fights everything else. On the long weekend that follows, fireside rooms from the cozy coloring pages and the patterns of the adult coloring pages keep the pencils busy.

Hello Kitty, Stitch and Snoopy Thanksgiving coloring pages

Plenty of kids want their favorite character at the table. Those sheets live in each character's collection:

• Hello Kitty wears a pilgrim hat and holds a pumpkin pie under the word THANKFUL in the Hello Kitty coloring pages.
• Stitch, the Disney alien, does the same with his own THANKFUL pie in the Stitch coloring pages.
• Snoopy peeks out of a big pile of autumn leaves and shares a supper bowl with Woodstock in the Snoopy coloring pages.

Fans of A Charlie Brown Thanksgiving, the 1973 TV special, will remember Snoopy serving buttered toast, popcorn, pretzels and jelly beans. A child can draw that menu on the supper bowl page.

Thanksgiving activities: a gratitude turkey and place cards

A gratitude turkey works in class and at home. Use the turkey with its feathers spread wide:

1. Print a turkey for each child, or a single one for the whole table.
2. Before coloring, write one thing you are thankful for inside each feather. Younger children say it and an adult writes.
3. Color around the words, then hang the turkeys together or pass the family one from guest to guest between courses.

Write the date on the back and keep it with the recipes.

For place cards, print the pie slice or the pumpkin wreath four to a sheet on card stock, cut them out and write a name on each. To send a card to grandparents, write Happy Thanksgiving in the clouds above the happy turkey, then fold the page in half.

The classroom theme can run from October to the end of November. The fall coloring pages, pumpkin coloring pages and Halloween coloring pages share the leaves and the harvest, and the Christmas coloring pages take over once the table is cleared.

Printing Thanksgiving pages before the big day

Print on Wednesday night, while the printer is free and nobody is basting anything. Each sheet is an A4 PDF at 300 dpi, full size on A4; on US Letter pick fit to page, and the turkey loses about six percent of its size and none of its tail. Tap Add to pack under each drawing to make one file for the whole kids' table, and use card stock for the place cards. The printing guide shows the settings.

The drawings are original to this site and free for home, school and community dinners. The rest of the calendar waits in the holiday coloring pages.