39 Christmas Coloring Pages: Easy Cartoons to Intricate Scenes

Christmas coloring pages are the easiest way to get a house full of people doing the same quiet thing at the same time. Below are 39 printable pages, running from four-line cartoon Santas that a three-year-old can finish before the kettle boils, to needle-by-needle trees that will take an adult a whole evening.

Each one comes with a note on what is actually difficult about it: the light source you should pick, the shape that will flatten if you fill it solid, the detail worth leaving white. Print what you like, work through the list in order, or hunt for the pages that match the box of pencils you already own.

If you want to draw rather than colour once the pages run out, these drawing ideas for all seasons include a full Christmas list, and this set of 21 Christmas tree coloring pages goes deeper on the tree alone.

Pick the Page That Fits the Person Coloring

Difficulty on a coloring page has almost nothing to do with subject and everything to do with line density: how small the enclosed shapes are, and how many of them there are. Sorting the list on that basis saves a lot of abandoned sheets.

• Under six: pages 24, 31 and 39. Thick outlines, nothing smaller than a thumbnail, and no shading required for the result to look finished.
• Confident children and casual adults: pages 2, 14, 16, 23, 27 and 28. Recognisable scenes with room to be tidy or messy, and enough shapes to stay interesting for half an hour.
• Adults who want an evening’s work: pages 5, 6, 13, 19, 21, 35 and 37. Fine repeating detail, real shading decisions, and portrait faces that reward a slow build.
• Something different: pages 8, 11, 26, 34 and 36 all have black backgrounds, which reverses the usual approach and takes a lighter hand than you expect.

If you are printing for a group, take two from each tier. The pages people gravitate towards are rarely the ones you would have handed them.

39 Christmas Coloring Pages to Print and Color

1. Santa in His Armchair, Making a Point

Santa is sunk into a wingback chair with a wrapped box balanced on his knee and one finger up, mid-sentence. The face fills most of the page, which makes this the best portrait practice in the set: warm skin sitting directly against a cool white beard, with almost nothing between them.

The glasses are the trap. Colour the lenses solid and his eyes vanish. Lay down the palest grey you own, or skip the lenses entirely and let the frames do the work.

2. Fireplace, Tree and a Sleeping Dog

Three light sources argue with each other on this page: the fire in the grate, the lights on the tree, and the candles along the mantel. Pick one to be dominant, usually the fire, and drop everything else a shade darker so the room has a centre.

The dog stretched across the rug is the only large pale mass low in the frame. Keep it light against the patterned floor and it anchors the whole composition.

3. Two Birds in Santa Hats

Two round little birds share a branch, each clutching a parcel barely bigger than its own foot, with pine sprigs closing in from all four corners.

Every feather is drawn as a short arc. Stroke your pencil the same way the arcs run, from the body outward, and the plumage reads as feathers rather than shading. If that kind of layered detail appeals to you, the bird coloring pages collection is built almost entirely on it.

4. Santa Versus the Christmas Turkey

The joke lives in the size mismatch. The turkey takes up two-thirds of the page, glove raised, staring Santa down while he glowers back from the corner.

Keep the bird in bronzes and warm browns and save full-strength red for Santa’s suit. If both go loud, the standoff turns into noise.

5. Christmas Tree in the Library

A slim tree stands next to a fat armchair, and behind them the shelves run to the top of the page, packed tight with books.

Those spines are the reward. Colouring them at random gives you visual static, so run a repeating sequence of three or four colours along each shelf instead. It takes longer and looks ten times better.

6. Patterned Santa with an Armful of Gifts

This Santa is drawn head to toe in pattern. His coat, belt, boots and even the sack are filled with small repeating motifs, so the shape of the figure only emerges once you commit to a colour scheme.

Treat each motif family as one colour and keep the total under five. That restraint is the same discipline the zentangle coloring pages rely on, and it is what stops a heavily patterned page from turning muddy.

7. Santa with the Sack Over His Shoulder

Santa is caught mid-stride, sack hoisted behind him, a small tower of parcels tucked under the other arm. Snowflake motifs float in the background rather than falling, which keeps the page flat and graphic.

The sack is the biggest single shape here. Filling it flat wastes it. Darken the underside where it folds over his shoulder and leave the top edge nearly white, and it stops looking like a balloon.

8. Night Delivery Under Falling Snow

The sky is already solid black and the snow is already white. Your only job is the lit third of the page: Santa, his parcels, and the nearest trees.

Work in reverse for this one. Decide first what stays white, then add colour around it. A white gel pen for a few extra flakes over Santa’s shoulders sells the depth in about thirty seconds.

9. Pine Wreath with a Big Bow

The simplest page in the collection and, for that reason, the most useful one. A pine ring, a scattering of cones, one oversized bow.

Use it to practise a single skill: taking one green from nearly-yellow at the outer tips to near-black where the needles overlap. Nothing else on the page competes for attention while you learn it.

10. Santa and the Baby

Barely any interior line work here, just two faces and a reaching hand. Everything this page becomes, you put there.

Skin tones are the whole exercise. Build them in three or four transparent passes rather than one heavy one, and keep the baby’s face a touch lighter than Santa’s so it reads as younger.

11. Ornaments Against a Night Sky

Half of this page is already filled in black, with white dots standing in for distant stars. What is left is a cluster of baubles hanging from heavy branches.

Baubles are spheres, and spheres need three things: a small hard highlight, a broad midtone, and a band of reflected light bouncing back along the bottom edge. Skip the reflected light and they flatten into circles.

12. Reindeer in a Wreath Collar

A reindeer stares straight out at you with a wreath hung round its neck, huge snowflakes above, and a heap of parcels at its feet.

Sort out the antlers before you touch anything else. They weave in front of some snowflakes and behind others, so decide the overlaps first and colour accordingly. Anyone who enjoys that structure should look at the deer coloring pages, which push the same antler geometry further.

13. Christmas Under Palm Trees

Not every Christmas is a white one. Palms lean over a town square, string lights run between them, and the crowd underneath is in short sleeves.

The colour logic flips completely: warm sky, warm pavement, and the tree as the only cool green in the frame. It is a genuinely different page to colour after a run of snow scenes.

14. Cobblestone Christmas Market Street

Timbered shopfronts crowd both sides of a cobbled street while shoppers walk away from you into the distance, bags in hand.

This is a perspective page. Keep colours strong on the two nearest buildings and wash everything further back with grey, and the street will pull away properly. The trick is borrowed from landscape work, and the landscape coloring pages give you more chances to drill it.

15. The Tree in an Empty Living Room

Clean lines, big open shapes, hardly any interior detail. Late-afternoon light comes through the window and the tree throws no clutter around it.

That emptiness is an invitation to work on floor and wall tone instead of ornaments. A grey-violet wall behind a warm wooden floor is quiet, and it makes the tree look lit.

16. Kids Decorating, Sketch Style

The linework here is loose and deliberately scruffy, with strokes overshooting the corners and the star scribbled in.

Do not try to tidy it. Colour in the same register: quick, overlapping strokes that run past the outline. Neat filling inside sketchy lines looks like a mistake, while loose colour on loose lines looks intentional.

17. Santa Holding Up a Gift

Santa presents a small parcel like it is the only one that matters, standing in a light snowfall with young pines behind him.

His fur trim is drawn as hundreds of short overlapping ticks. Colour lightly underneath and let the ticks stay white, and the fur turns fluffy. Fill straight over them and it becomes a stripe.

18. Two Kids in Winter Coats

Two children stand shoulder to shoulder in front of the tree, bundled into hats, scarves and thick coats.

Their faces are small but completely drawn, right down to the eyelashes. Do those first with a sharp pencil while your hand is fresh, then the coats, which forgive almost anything.

19. Santa’s Face, Close and Patterned

Santa’s head fills the frame. His hat is a pattern field in its own right, stuffed with tiny holly, dots and spirals, and his beard falls in long wavy ribbons to the bottom edge.

Restraint wins here. Colouring the beard pure white leaves it dead, so use a cool grey in the shadowed folds and let the paper be the highlight. The freckles go on last, dotted in, never dragged.

20. Mother and Child at the Tree

Both figures are seen from behind, so there are no faces to carry the moment. The reaching arms do it instead, one long and one short, both stretched towards the same branch.

Keep their clothing muted. The second you make the jumpers brighter than the tree, the page stops being about the tree.

21. Girl in the Chunky Knit Scarf

A hat with a fat pom-pom, a scarf wound twice round the neck, and a face full of freckles looking straight out.

The scarf is the real work. Cable knit only reads as knitted if you put a shadow into every groove between the cables and leave the raised braids pale. The same logic shows up in these Christmas knitting ideas if you want to see how the stitches actually behave.

22. Looking Up as the Snow Falls

She is tilted back at a three-quarter angle, watching the snow come down, with a slouchy hat pushed back off her forehead.

Because she is looking up, the light has to come from above. Keep the forehead, the bridge of the nose and the top of the cheekbone brightest, and let everything under the chin and jaw fall away into shadow.

23. Santa’s Armful of Parcels

Bold even outlines, no interior shading, a stack of boxes that reaches Santa’s chin. This one is built for felt tips rather than pencils.

Give every parcel different paper. Stripes, dots, a plain one, a plaid, and the pile stops looking like a single block and starts looking like a delivery.

24. Santa with Cocoa by the Fire

The only Santa in the set who is doing nothing at all. He is sitting on a bench in a cabin, boots out in front of him, holding a mug in both hands.

The steam is drawn as three thin curls. Leave them as bare paper and darken the stonework just behind them, and the steam appears without you colouring a single line of it.

25. Simple Santa and the Outdoor Tree

Fewer lines than anything else here: a round Santa, a triangular tree, three clouds. For a child under six this is the page to start with, and it is the one that survives a crayon grip.

Older colourists can use it as a five-minute colour test. Try an unexpected pair of hues on the tree before committing them to one of the dense pages later in the list.

26. Santa Hugging the Tree at Midnight

Eyes shut, arms wrapped around a small tree, under a black sky loaded with white starbursts.

With the eyes closed, the entire expression rests on the curve of the cheek and the line of the mouth. Keep colour off both. A blush on the cheek is fine; anything heavier and he looks sunburnt rather than happy.

27. Girl in a Long Dress Trimming the Tree

She is stretched up on her toes with a bauble held out towards a high branch, and her tiered dress has more line detail in it than the tree does.

Fabric is the exercise. Every ruffle needs a dark seam at its base and a lighter face where it lifts away. If you enjoy that, the dress coloring pages are nothing but fabric problems.

28. Cartoon Girl with a Bauble

Big eyes, clean shapes, generous gaps between lines. She holds a striped bauble in both hands while a snowflake and a star sit on the tree behind her.

The wide flat areas make this a good page for testing a marker set. You will find out quickly which of your pens bleed.

29. Santa Leaping Off the Chimney

The only real action pose in the collection. Santa launches off the chimney stack with a fist thrown up, one boot still trailing behind him.

His body makes a single long diagonal from that raised fist to the back foot, and the pose only reads if the diagonal stays clean. Keep the brickwork pale and grey so nothing behind him competes with the line of his body.

30. Pug in a Christmas Sweater

A pug sits front-on in a jumper and scarf, hemmed in by pine and hanging baubles, looking mildly put upon.

A pug’s face is a set of folds, and shading the creases is the whole job. Push a warm grey into each one and leave the rounded ridges bare. There are more faces built this way in the dog coloring pages.

31. Two Kids Exchanging a Gift

Thick outlines, wide spacing, one string of bulbs overhead and a single parcel passing between two pairs of hands.

This is the most forgiving page here for very young children. Nothing is small enough to be frustrating, and the bulbs give an easy excuse to use every colour in the box at once.

32. Snow Play by the Tree

Two toddlers in bucket hats mess about in the snow beside a tree that has been decorated outdoors, with flakes drawn as open circles and six-point stars right across the page.

Leave most of those flakes white. Filling them in kills the snowfall and, more practically, doubles your work for nothing.

33. Boy in the Christmas Waistcoat

Dressed up for the evening in a damask waistcoat and bow tie, one hand in his pocket, standing beside the tree and a latticed window.

The waistcoat carries all the pattern while the face is left plain, so the temptation is to overwork the fabric. Keep it to two close tones and the boy stays the subject.

34. Three Kids and a Glowing Tree

Another reversed page: the sky is solid black and the children and tree are white shapes cut out of it.

Colour lightly. On a page this dark, mid-tones read as bright, so a pale pink scarf will glow like a neon sign. Anything you press hard on will simply disappear into the black.

35. Tree by the Window, Presents Below

The densest page in the collection. Individual needles, dozens of baubles, a garland swagged over the window frame and a serious pile of parcels at the base.

Do not attempt this in one sitting. Work it in bands, top to bottom, and stop at the end of a band rather than in the middle of one. Coming back to a half-finished section is how tone drifts.

36. Merry Merry Christmas Lettering

Three lines of hand lettering sit in the middle of a page packed edge to edge with doodled baubles, canes and holly.

Choose the letter colour before you touch the background. Lettering pages fail when the surrounding doodles end up in the same value as the words and the message stops being readable from across the room.

37. Girl with Closed Eyes Under the Baubles

Eyes closed, face calm, hat and coat covered in geometric motifs, with heavy ornaments hanging out of a black sky above her.

Pattern is everywhere on this one, so limit yourself hard: three colours plus a neutral, repeated across hat, coat and trees. Restriction is what holds a busy page together.

38. Boy Holding Two Snowflake Ornaments

A small boy in a tasselled hat looks up and away while two snowflake ornaments dangle from strings in his hands.

His is the most convincingly drawn child’s face in the set, with real modelling around the eyes and mouth. The strings are hair-thin, so colour around them rather than over them or they vanish.

39. Layered Tree with Holly Border

A stylised tree built from stacked scalloped tiers, each one holding a different little motif, framed by holly and berries.

Because the tiers are separate bands, this page is made for a graduated palette: darkest green at the bottom, lifting a step with every tier until the star. Quick, satisfying, and a good one to end on.

Five Techniques That Lift Any Christmas Page

Commit to a Palette Before the First Stroke

Red, green, gold, silver and white will always read as Christmas, but using all five on every page is what makes finished work look busy. Choose three plus one neutral and hold that line across the whole sheet. On a patterned page like Santa’s face or the lettering sheet, that single decision is the difference between rich and chaotic.

Use Metallics Where Light Would Actually Fall

Gold and silver pens are best used as accents, not fills. Put them on the star, the rim of a bauble, the edge of a ribbon, the tinsel catching light. Metallic ink sits on top of the paper and reflects, so a thin line of it reads as a highlight from across the room while a filled shape just goes flat and grey.

Break Up Large Shapes with Pattern

Sacks, jumpers, wrapping paper and rugs are the biggest empty areas on most of these pages, and flat colour makes them look unfinished. Small dots, crosshatching, stripes or a plaid grid give the eye something to hold. Keep the pattern small and consistent inside each shape so it reads as fabric rather than decoration.

Layer for Depth Instead of Pressing Harder

Three light passes of the same green will always beat one heavy one. Layering keeps the paper tooth intact, so you can keep adding, and it lets you shift hue slightly between passes for a tree that is not one flat colour. Save the darkest values for where shapes overlap and tuck behind one another.

Match the Tool to the Line Density

Markers and dense line work do not get along. On a page like the window scene or the patterned Santa, the shapes between lines are narrower than a marker nib, so the colour floods across the outline and the detail you were paying for disappears. Those pages want coloured pencils, or fineliners if you want flat colour. Save markers and crayons for the open cartoon pages, where their strength is coverage and their bleed does not matter. If you only own one set, sharp coloured pencils will handle every page here; nothing else in this list will.

Make the Page Yours

Write a name on a gift tag, add a date in the corner, change the colour of a scarf to match a real one. Small personal edits turn a printed sheet into something worth keeping, which matters if the finished page is going to end up framed or posted.

What to Do With the Finished Pages

A colored page pinned to the fridge for a week is a waste of an evening’s work. These sheets print on standard paper and hold up well to cutting, folding and mounting, so most of them can be given a second life:

• Framed prints: the portrait pages and the lettering sheet fit a standard A4 frame with no trimming and look intentional on a shelf.
• Paper garland: cut out the wreath, the layered tree and the smaller baubles, punch two holes in each and string them along a mantel.
• Cards and gift wrap: fold a finished page in half for a card, or scan one and tile it to print your own wrapping paper.
• Tree decorations: mount the small motifs on card, laminate them and add a ribbon loop. They survive being packed away and reused next year.

If the holiday coloring habit sticks, it carries backwards and forwards through the calendar. The Thanksgiving coloring pages cover the month before this one, and the penguin coloring pages keep the snow going well into January.

Running a Christmas Coloring Session That Works

Coloring holds a mixed-age group together better than almost any other activity, but only if the setup is right. Print more pages than you think you need and lay them out so people can choose their own difficulty. Handing a detailed window scene to a five-year-old guarantees a lost interest within ten minutes; handing the four-line Santa to an adult guarantees the same.

Put pencils and markers in the middle where everyone can reach, not in individual sets, because sharing the same box quietly keeps the palettes across the table related. Add music and something warm to drink, and let people leave and come back. The pages that get finished at these sessions are almost never the ones people started with.

For younger children, keeping the difficulty low is the whole trick. Simple bold shapes like the gift exchange page work far better than anything detailed, and the same principle runs through these easy drawing ideas for kids if they want to move on to drawing their own.

Why Coloring Settles People Down

The reason coloring calms you is not mysterious. It gives your attention a narrow, undemanding task with a visible result, which is close to what a guided meditation asks of you but easier to start. Repetitive fills, needles on a tree, bricks on a chimney, cables in a scarf, are the most effective at this, because the decision-making load is almost zero once you have chosen your colour.

For children the benefits are more concrete: pencil grip, staying inside a line, recognising the shapes and sequences an ornament pattern is built from. Talking through what is happening in a page while they work on it, who the gift is for, why the street is busy, does more for language than the coloring itself.

It also works better than most seasonal activities for the same reason a jigsaw does: you can stop mid-way without losing anything. Half a coloured tree is still half a coloured tree tomorrow, so nobody has to finish, and the pressure that ruins craft projects with children never builds up in the first place.

Moving From Coloring to Drawing

Coloring these pages teaches you what a good line looks like, and the natural next step is to make your own. Pick a page you enjoyed and redraw one element of it freehand on blank paper. The bow from the wreath, the pug’s face, a single bauble. Copying from a printed page you have already spent an hour looking at is far easier than starting cold.

From there, designing your own card front or ornament is a short jump. If the words come more easily than the pictures, these holiday-themed winter writing prompts give the same seasonal starting point in a different medium.

Christmas Coloring Pages: Frequently Asked Questions

What paper should I print these on?

Standard 80gsm printer paper is fine for pencils and crayons. Markers will bleed through it, so switch to 120gsm or heavier if you are using alcohol pens, and print single-sided either way. For anything you plan to frame, cardstock at around 200gsm takes wet media without buckling.

Which of these pages suit young children?

The gift exchange page, the simple outdoor Santa, the sketch-style tree and the layered holly tree all have thick lines and large open areas, which is what small hands need. As a rough test, if a shape is smaller than a fingertip, a child under six will find it frustrating.

How do I colour the black-background pages without ruining them?

Work light. On the night-sky pages, mid-tones already read as bright against solid black, so use pale colours and a gentle hand. Coloured pencils and gel pens sit on top of the ink; a marker will only lift the black and smear it.

Do I need expensive pencils for the detailed pages?

No, but you do need sharp ones. A cheap pencil kept to a fine point beats a soft artist pencil worn blunt on any of the dense pages here. If you buy one upgrade, make it a set with a wider range of greens and greys rather than a bigger set of everything.

Print a few, put the box in the middle of the table and see who sits down. That is usually all it takes.