Thanksgiving Coloring Pages: 90 Free Printable PDFs

The detailed book is the one for an adult who wants a proper evening with a page. Its thirty scenes have a foreground, a middle distance and a horizon: a cider press in a yard beside a crate of apples, root cellar shelves lined with sealed jars, corn cobs hanging from a barn beam with daylight coming through the open door, geese walking up a lane toward a farmhouse. There is a lot of line work in each one.

The cute book is the crowd pleaser, and the one children reach for first. Everything is round, everything is smiling, and that includes the cornucopia, the teapot, the stack of plates and the flour sack. It leans domestic rather than outdoorsy, so alongside the chibi turkeys you get a hedgehog holding a dinner roll and a cat sitting under the table waiting for something to drop.

The simple book is built for the youngest hands. One subject fills the page, the outlines are marker thick, and every other object is kept well clear so nothing accidentally gets coloured together. A whole pie, a bowl of cranberries, a corn cob, a big round turkey. If you are printing thanksgiving coloring sheets for a preschool table, this is the one to run off in bulk.

Turkeys turn up in all three books and they are drawn very differently in each. The simple book gives you a big round bird with a fanned tail and almost nothing else on the page. The cute book puts one in a knitted beanie with a pompom, another peeking out from behind a smiling pumpkin, and one flat on a cushion after the meal with its eyes closed. The detailed book keeps them wild, roosting on a bare branch at dusk or strutting past each other across a stubble field.

Cornucopias are the other page people search for by name. The simple book has one spilling a pumpkin, an apple and a pear with clear white gaps between them so a small child can work through it one shape at a time. The cute book gives its horn a face and puts happy faces on everything falling out of it. If you want a whole book of just the bird, the turkey collection linked above runs to another thirty designs.

A surprising amount of this collection is food, and those are consistently the pages that get finished. Pumpkin pie shows up as a thick wedge with a swirl of cream in the simple book and as a smiling slice next to a cinnamon stick in the cute one. There are dinner rolls in a basket, a bowl of cranberries, mashed potato with a dip in the top, a jar of preserves with a cloth tied over the lid, and a whole lattice topped pie.

Food pages are also the easiest place to be brave with colour. Nobody minds a purple pie. If you want one that looks properly appetising instead, keep the crust in two close browns and put the strongest colour on whatever sits beside it, the plate or the cloth, so the pie stays the lightest thing on the page.

The detailed book handles food at the other end of the scale, as whole scenes rather than single objects. A long table after the meal with the chairs pushed back and one slice left, a pie cooling on a windowsill with a rolling pin beside it, and two squirrels on a back doorstep with their paws already in it.

The detailed book runs a quiet story through its thirty pages, and it is worth colouring in order the first time. It opens with a line of woodland animals carrying covered dishes along a path toward a table laid outdoors under a broad tree. Then two mice fold napkins on the tabletop, rabbits haul a pumpkin up a garden path, and a handcart of dishes arrives at a farmhouse door hung with a wheat wreath.

It carries on through the meal and out the other side. Birds watch from the windowsill, a dog lies under the table with its head on its paws, an owl perches on a branch above two bowls, and a deer stands at the edge of a bare field looking toward lit windows. The last page is the two turkeys back out in the stubble, which is a nice place for it to end.

These are the pages worth putting on heavier paper. The barns, hedgerows and shelves of jars pack fine lines close together, and thin copy paper lets marker ink feather across them.

The most useful thing here is not the colouring, it is the hour before the meal when the table is set and nobody can sit down yet. Print a stack of thanksgiving pictures to color, put them at one end with a tub of pencils, and the children have somewhere to be. The simple book is the one for that, since nothing on those pages needs explaining.

The single subject pages also cut out cleanly, which makes them the easiest place cards you will ever make. Print the turkey or the pie at about a quarter size, colour it, cut round the outline and fold a tab at the base. Ten of them is one afternoon and children will happily do the cutting.

For gratitude themes, the plate page in the simple book works well as a blank to write on around the rim once it is coloured. It is the same idea as a thankful jar and takes about the same amount of effort.

Each book opens as one thanksgiving coloring pages pdf in the reader, so you can print a single page to test a palette or run all thirty at once. Ordinary copy paper is completely fine for the simple and cute books, since those pages are big open shapes and most children reach for crayons and pencils anyway.

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 of thanksgiving coloring pages printable for a classroom or a long table, print one test sheet first and check the border frame is not clipped.

All 90 of these free thanksgiving coloring pages are free to download and print as often as you like, this year and next. Nothing here expires and nothing needs an account.