Christmas Treat Bag Toppers: 8 Free Printables, Four With Room for a Name
You will finish this with eight Christmas toppers for bags of sweets or baking. A topper is the folded paper strip you staple over the top of a filled bag, and these ones come in two kinds, because bags of sweets get handed over for two quite different reasons at Christmas.
Download: Christmas treat bag toppers, free PDF, Letter + A4. No signup, no email.
The two jobs, because they need different toppers
Four of these say something: Merry Christmas!, From Santa, From our kitchen, Something sweet. Those are for the bag you hand to a neighbour, drop into a stocking, or send round with a jar of biscuits. The message is the whole point and you want it printed properly.
The other four carry no message, and that is deliberate. Twenty-four bags for a class need twenty-four names on them. A teacher's bag needs the teacher's name. A cousin getting the same sweets as her sister still wants to know which bag is hers. None of that can be printed in advance, so those four are a snowflake, a bauble, a mitten and a bell with no message on them. Under the picture sits the small grey line saying which bag it fits, and under that a clear half-inch strip along the bottom of the topper. That strip is where the name goes, and you write it on yourself.
What you need
- The PDF
- Plain printer paper is fine. Thin card, around 160gsm, folds crisper and stands up better, so use it if you have it and do not go out for it.
- Scissors
- A stapler, or sticky tape on the inside where it will not show
- The bags. Clear cello bags or ordinary sandwich bags both work.
- A pen for the blank ones. Anything that does not bleed through, tested on a spare.
What is in the file
Six pages: three topper sheets at US Letter, then the same three at A4. Print the three that match your paper, not all six.
Pages one and two, four toppers for a 4 inch (100mm) bag, two to a page. A tree, a stocking, a gingerbread man and a candy cane, each with its message underneath.
Page three, four toppers for a 3 inch (75mm) bag, four to a page. A snowflake, a bauble, a mitten and a bell, with no message on them, just the size line and a clear strip along the bottom for a name.
Every topper has its own size printed on it, which matters more than it sounds. You will download this file in November, print half of it, and come back to it a fortnight later having forgotten everything about it. The size is on the paper, so the paper can tell you.
Each strip has a dashed line round the outside to cut along and a lighter dashed line across the middle marked fold. The picture sits on the bottom half, which becomes the front when you fold it. The same picture is printed upside down on the top half so the back of the topper is the right way up too, which is why the flat sheet looks wrong and the folded topper looks right.
How to print it
- Print only the pages that match your paper. Letter is pages 1 to 3, A4 is pages 4 to 6.
- Set Actual Size, not Fit to Page. Fit to Page shrinks the sheet by a few percent, and then the topper no longer covers the bag it says it fits.
- Black and white is all that is in the file, so nothing is lost on a black-and-white printer.
- Cut one out and hold it against a bag before you print a stack. Bags sold as the same size do vary.
The busiest sheet is a little over 1% ink coverage, so a run of thirty costs almost nothing and they photocopy cleanly.
Putting one on a bag
Fill the bag, flatten the top, and press a crease into it. Fold the topper along its dashed line, slide it over the bag so the two creases sit together, and put two staples through both layers at the small bracket marks. Two is enough; more and the paper tears when someone opens it.
If you are making a lot, work in stages: fold them all, then cut them all, then staple them all. It is quicker and the folds come out more alike. There is a longer version of this, with the same folding and stapling, on the Halloween treat bag toppers page.
Writing on the blank ones
Write the names before you fold and staple, while the strip is still flat on the table. It is much easier, and if you spoil one you have not wasted a bag of sweets.
The name goes on the clear strip along the bottom of the lower half, under the small grey size line. Keep it down there rather than higher up, because the top half folds over to the back, and anything written above the fold ends up behind the bag.
The two little bracket marks in that strip are where the staples go. There is about an inch and a half of clear paper between them, which is room enough for a long name. The back of the topper has space too, above the upside-down picture, if you want to put something small there as well.
For a class, write the names first and lay the strips out in a row. You will spot a missing child faster on the table than at the door.
More Christmas printables
If you are wrapping as well as bagging, the Christmas gift tags to colour are twelve tags with To and From lines, and the Christmas jar labels are for the baking that does not fit in a bag. For the quiet hour after lunch there is a large-print Christmas word search.
Everything we make is on the free printables page, and none of it needs an email address.
