Christmas Coloring Pages: 60 Free Printable PDFs

The detailed book is the one to sit down with properly. Its thirty pages are full scenes with a foreground, a middle distance and a horizon, and most of them have an animal doing something rather than posing: two hares hanging berries on a young pine, oxen hauling a sledge stacked with logs and parcels, a crow flying home with a ribbon in its beak, badgers looking out from under the roots of a big tree. There is a lot of line work per page and one takes an evening rather than ten minutes.

The simple book is built for the youngest hands. One subject fills the page, the outlines are marker thick, and everything else is kept well clear so nothing accidentally gets coloured together. A jingle bell, a stocking, a yule log, a polar bear cub, a stack of wrapped presents. If you are printing christmas coloring sheets for a preschool table or a long car journey, this is the one to run off in bulk.

Adults who colour to unwind almost always want the detailed book, and children under six almost always want the simple one. Between about five and nine either works, and it is worth printing one page of each to see which holds their attention.

The detailed book is set in one snowy village and the woods around it, and it is worth colouring in order the first time. It opens on a street of stone cottages with lit windows and a tall fir at the far end, then moves to a window stacked with cakes and iced biscuits with a cat asleep on the sill, a handcart of parcels outside a door, an owl on the church steeple looking down over the roofs.

From there it wanders out of the village and back again. A deer stands in the snow looking in at a decorated room. Six birds in scarves line up along a wire above the rooftops. A cat walks down an alley strung with garlands and lanterns. A stoat in its white winter coat crosses an open clearing with its tracks trailing behind it. The last page is the whole village asleep at midnight under a wide starry sky with one window still lit.

These are the pages worth putting on heavier paper, around 120 gsm, if markers are involved. The cottage brickwork, the hedgerows and the stacked woodpile pack fine lines close together and thin copy paper lets the ink feather across them.

The simple book is deliberately plain. Every page is one large object sitting on a single low ground line with at most a cloud or a crescent moon above it, and that is the whole picture. It sounds thin written down, and it is exactly right at that age, because a small child can finish a page and feel they finished something.

The subjects are the ones a child names first: a jingle bell with a bow, a stocking on a peg, a star biscuit on a plate, a Christmas pudding, a snowflake, a toy drum with its sticks, a wooden rocking horse, a paper chain, a wreath. A few animals turn up too, a fat robin, a polar bear cub, a penguin chick and a mouse holding a berry, and those are usually the first ones to get coloured.

Ordinary copy paper is completely fine here. Crayons suit these pages better than pencils, since the open areas are large and there is nothing fiddly to stay inside.

Worth saying plainly, because plenty of people arrive looking for santa coloring pages: there is no Santa here, and no elves either. Every book we draw leaves people out entirely, which keeps the whole library consistent and means a page never turns into an awkward cartoon face. What you get instead is the world around him. Sledges, parcels, stockings on the mantel, lanterns, wreaths, and animals wearing the scarves and hats that a person would otherwise be wearing.

Reindeer are the exception that proves the point, since a reindeer is an animal and turns up happily. There is a whole bold and easy reindeer set linked above if that is what you were after, and snowmen have their own book too.

If a Santa page is genuinely what you need for a classroom or a party, these are not the books, and it is better to say so than to waste your ink finding out.

Thirty pages in a book and twenty four days in Advent is close enough that the detailed book works well as a page a day. Print the lot at the start of the month, clip them together, and do one after dinner. Colouring the same book slowly in order gives it a shape that dipping in and out never does, and by the middle of the month the village starts to feel like a place.

If you want them to hang together as a set, hold yourself to a small palette. Warm reds and greens with one cool blue held back for the snow shadows is the version that looks most deliberate, and it stops page twenty from looking like a different book to page two.

The simple pages cut out cleanly, which makes them the easiest decorations going. A row of coloured bells and stars taped along a window costs nothing, and the paper chain page is a nice joke to hang next to a real one.

Each book opens as one christmas coloring pages pdf in the reader, so you can print a single page to test a palette or run all thirty at once. Print in portrait at 100% rather than fit to page. Every design already carries a wide margin, so scaling down only shrinks the areas you actually want to colour.

If you are running off a stack for a classroom, print one test sheet first and check the border frame is not being clipped. It is the one thing that goes wrong, and it is much cheaper to find out on sheet one than on sheet thirty.

All 60 of these free christmas coloring pages are free to download and print as often as you like, this year and every year after. Nothing here expires and nothing needs an account.