Christmas Coloring Book: 12 Free Printable Pages in One PDF

Twelve Christmas colouring pages in one file, so you print once and hand over a stack rather than going back to a website every twenty minutes. There is a cover and twelve pages, all black line work, with US Letter and A4 in the same PDF.

The pages are a Christmas tree, a snowman, a stocking on the mantel, a gingerbread house, a reindeer, a robin, a pile of presents, a hat and mittens, Santa's sleigh over the rooftops, a jar of candy canes, a sledge by the back door, and the Christmas dinner table set and waiting.

Download: Christmas colouring book, free PDF, Letter + A4. No signup, no email.

The gallery version of this goes: you click a thumbnail, you get one image, you print it, and ten minutes later somebody wants another one and you are back at the laptop with sticky fingers on the trackpad. This is one file with twelve pages in it. Print the lot in the morning and the afternoon looks after itself.

What you need

• The PDF
• Plain printer paper. Ordinary copier paper is fine. Slightly thicker paper stops felt tips bleeding through onto the table.
• Whatever you colour with. Pencils, crayons and felt tips all work on these.
• A printer that prints black. There is no colour anywhere in the file.

What is in the file

Thirteen sheets, printed twice over: pages 1 to 13 are US Letter and pages 14 to 26 are the same thirteen at A4. Print one set. The cover comes first, then the twelve colouring pages in this order.

1. The cover. A small line-drawn tree with a star, above the words Christmas Colouring Book. There is nothing to fill in on it, so skip it if you would rather not spend the paper.
2. A decorated Christmas tree with a star on top, baubles hanging on every branch and six wrapped presents piled underneath.
3. A snowman in a garden, top hat and scarf and stick arms, with a bare tree beside him and a picket fence running along behind.
4. A stocking on the mantelpiece, with a candy cane and a small wrapped present sticking out of the top. A holly garland runs along the shelf above and there is a fireplace below.
5. A gingerbread house. This is the busiest page in the book, with icing along every edge, rows of round sweets, a candy cane fence and stepping stones up to the door.
6. A reindeer standing in the snow with a bell on its collar and two fir trees behind. Friendly rather than realistic.
7. A robin on a holly branch, surrounded by leaves and clusters of berries. Lots of small shapes to fill.
8. A stack of six wrapped presents, every one in a different pattern, so stripes, diagonals, spots and stars.
9. A wooly bobble hat and two mittens with snowflakes on them. Big shapes and very few lines, which makes this the one to hand a small child first.
10. Santa in his sleigh flying over snow-covered rooftops with stars scattered around him.
11. A jar of candy canes on a wooden shelf, with two baubles and a sprig of holly beside it.
12. A sledge by the back door, snow boots on the step and a scarf hanging on a hook.
13. The Christmas dinner table, laid and waiting. Plates, napkins, glasses, cutlery, a lit candle and a bowl of fruit, with a holly centrepiece in the middle.

That last one was somebody's idea rather than ours. The request was for something a child could sit down with while the adults were cooking, and a table already set for dinner felt like the right page to be colouring in while the actual one is being got ready.

How to print it

1. Print only the pages that match your paper. Letter is pages 1 to 13, A4 is pages 14 to 26. If you print the whole file you get everything twice.
2. Set Actual Size rather than Fit to Page. Fit to Page shrinks the artwork and leaves a wider white border. Nothing breaks either way, it just looks less like a book.
3. Black and white is all there is, so there is no colour setting to get wrong.
4. Print the whole set at once if you can. The point of a stack is that nobody has to come and ask for the next one.

The heaviest page in the book is the gingerbread house, measured at 14.5% ink coverage, and everything else is lighter than that. It is black line work with no grey fill behind it, which means it photocopies cleanly if you want a pile of them for a classroom or a stall.

How long twelve pages actually lasts

Somewhere between four and six hours of colouring, spread over as many sittings as it takes. When we timed our craft table colouring page a child took twenty to thirty minutes over it, and these pages are a similar amount of work. The gingerbread house and the robin will take an older child longer than that. The hat and mittens page will be done in ten minutes flat.

Twelve is a deliberate number rather than a round one. We stopped there because page thirteen would have been a second tree in a different hat, and a stack padded out with near-repeats is a worse thing to hand a child than a shorter stack of pages that are all different.

Getting more out of it than one afternoon

A finished page is worth more than the recycling. Cut the border off a coloured tree and it is a gift tag. Fold a page in half and it is a card for a grandparent, which is a better present than most things bought.

If you want the rest of the December paper in one printing session, the Christmas gift tags to colour are the same idea at tag size, the large-print Christmas word search works for the same quiet half hour with somebody older, and the Christmas scavenger hunt clue cards are for the point in the day when sitting still has stopped being an option. All of them are on the free printables page.