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My daughter asked for a witch on October 1st and I had nothing ready. So I did what I do every year now: pulled up a few coloring files online, sent them to the printer, and bought myself an hour of quiet at the kitchen table.
Coloring pages are the cheapest Halloween activity I know. You print, you hand over the crayons, and suddenly you have eight kids at a folding table instead of eight kids climbing the couch. I keep a folder of them on my desktop and add to it all year. The good ones get printed twice because somebody always wants a redo.
A few of the files below are ones I grabbed from an indie design shop, and yes, some of those links are affiliate links, so if you buy one I get a tiny cut at no extra cost to you. Crayons not included. Here is what worked.
Black Cats That Survived a Birthday Party
I printed the cat pages for my niece’s October birthday, eleven six-year-olds, and they vanished faster than the cupcakes. Something about cats. Every kid wanted the one with the big arched back, so I ran it three more times mid-party while frosting dripped onto the printer tray.
The line art is thick, which matters more than people think. Skinny outlines and a four-year-old with a marker is a recipe for a gray smudge that used to be a cat. These hold up. I ran them on plain 24 lb copy paper because it was a crowd and I was not laminating thirty pages.
One gripe: a couple of the pages pack a lot of little background bats into the corners. Cute for the older kids, frustrating for the toddlers who just wanted to scribble orange and move on. I skip those two pages for the little ones.
The Set I Print When I Need Twenty Quiet Minutes
This is my go-to when my son is winding up and dinner is forty minutes out. The cute style, round little ghosts and friendly pumpkins, no actual scares, so nothing gets too spooky at 6pm on a school night.
I print these on whatever is in the tray, usually leftover printer paper, because they get colored once and recycled. No frame, no lamination, no ceremony. He colors, he tapes it to the fridge himself with too much tape, it lives there until December.
The one thing I would change is the page margins. They print a hair close to the edge, so if your printer eats the bottom strip like mine does, you lose a sliver of the pumpkin stem. I just bump the print scale to 95% and the whole thing fits.
Gentle Pages for the Kid Who Hates Scary
My nephew is six and decided last fall that Halloween was too scary. Skeletons, no. Spiders, absolutely not. These sweet pages were the bridge: smiling candy corn, a pumpkin with eyelashes, nothing that triggered the no-thank-you face.
I printed two on 65 lb cardstock so they felt a little nicer, set him up at the porch table with colored pencils, and he colored a whole jack-o-lantern without once asking if it was going to come alive. Win. He took it home and his mom texted me a photo of it on their fridge.
My nitpick is that there are only a handful of pages in this one, so if you have a big group you will run through it fast. For one kid over an afternoon, it is exactly right.
The Big Bundle I Keep Coming Back To All October
When you want one file that lasts the whole month, this is it. The bundle has enough pages that I printed a fresh one every Saturday in October and never repeated. My partner started joking that the dining table had become a coloring factory.
The variety is the selling point. Some pages are simple enough for a four-year-old, some have enough detail that my nine-year-old neighbor actually stayed in the lines and got smug about it. I printed the easy ones on copy paper and the detailed ones on the heavier 110 lb stock so the markers would not bleed through onto the wood.
One honest note: it is a lot of pages, so do not hit print-all unless you mean it. I did that the first year and watched twenty sheets pile up while I scrambled for more orange. Print the pages you want, not the whole stack.
Chubby Little Ghosts My Daughter Refused to Share
Kawaii is my daughter’s whole personality right now, so these were a guaranteed hit. Tiny round ghosts with dot eyes, a pumpkin that looks like it wants a hug. She colored four of them and declared they were a family and named each one.
I ran these on cardstock because she wanted to keep them, and we taped the foursome along the kitchen window where the morning light hits them. They are still up. I have given up on taking them down before Thanksgiving.
The only thing worth flagging is that the cuteness leans young. My older neighbor kid thought they were babyish and wanted skeletons instead. So know your audience before you print a stack of adorable ghosts for a ten-year-old.
Twenty Pages, One File, Zero Planning
Sometimes I do not want to curate. I want to click one thing, print, and be done. This twenty-page set is that thing. I printed the lot the night before a rainy-day playdate and stacked them on the kids’ craft table with a bucket of crayons.
What I like is the range inside one download. Pumpkins, bats, a haunted house, a couple of friendly monsters. Enough that four different kids each found a favorite and nobody fought over the same page. I kept it simple and used plain paper, no frame, straight from the tray to the table.
My small complaint is that a few of the pages repeat the same border style, so back to back they can feel a little samey. I just shuffled the order before I handed them out and nobody noticed.
The Coloring Book I Stapled Into a Real Booklet
This one I treated like an actual book. Printed the pages double-sided, folded them, and ran three staples down the spine so my son had a little booklet to carry around. He felt very official about it and colored in the car on the way to my sister’s.
The kawaii style here is soft and round, easy for small hands, and the line work is bold enough that even his enthusiastic scribbling looked intentional. I used 65 lb paper so it folded clean without cracking at the spine. Regular paper tears at the fold, I learned that the hard way one year with a different book.
Nitpick: double-siding means you need a printer that does it well, and mine occasionally pulls two sheets at once and prints page seven on top of page eight. Watch the first few pages or you get a ghost-on-ghost mess.
More Kawaii, For When the First Batch Got Colored Twice
We went through the cute ghosts so fast last year that I needed a second kawaii set, and this was the refill. Same friendly vibe, different little characters, so it did not feel like coloring the same page again.
I printed a couple onto sticker paper one rainy afternoon as an experiment, colored them, cut them out, and my daughter stuck them all over her water bottle. That was an accident of having sticker paper lying around, but it turned into the best craft hour we had all month. Regular cardstock works perfectly fine too.
The one thing I noticed is the pages run a touch detailed for the smallest hands. My friend’s three-year-old got overwhelmed by the tiny faces and just colored everything purple, which honestly looked great, so maybe that is not a real complaint.
Friendly Ghosts for the Front Window Display
I have a thing where every October the front window gets a parade of kid-colored ghosts taped up facing the street. These cute ghost pages were last fall’s batch. My daughter and the neighbor kid colored a dozen between them on a Sunday afternoon and we hung every single one.
The ghosts are simple, big open shapes, which is exactly what you want for taping in a window where the light comes through. We colored a few with markers and a few with crayon, and the marker ones glow better against the morning sun. The crayon ones looked waxy and flat from the street.
One practical gripe: the file gives you a few ghosts per page, so if you want them big and individual you will be trimming a lot. I cut them out with kid scissors while the kids colored the next batch, which kept everyone busy.
The Companion Ghost Set I Printed for Round Two
This is the sibling set to the ghosts above, more of the same friendly faces, and I grabbed it because the window display needed restocking after a windy night took half of them down. A guest at our movie night colored three while the rest of us watched the kids’ Halloween lineup.
What makes these easy is how forgiving the shapes are. There is no fine detail to mess up, so even an adult who has not held a crayon since the nineties can sit down and color a ghost without overthinking it. We laminated a few of these so they could go back in the window without curling in the damp.
My only note is that this set overlaps a lot with the first ghost file, so if you already bought that one you may feel some deja vu. Grab one or the other unless you genuinely need forty ghosts, which, for the record, I did.
Frequently Asked Questions
Do kids get halloween off school?
No. Halloween is not a public holiday in the US, so school runs as normal on October 31st. Most kids go to class, sometimes wear a costume for a class party, and do the actual trick-or-treating in the evening.
That is exactly why I print coloring pages the week before. The teachers often want a quiet activity for the party hour, and a stack of Halloween pages plus a box of crayons buys a calm twenty minutes in a room full of sugar-high kids.
Do kids celebrate halloween in japan?
Sort of, but differently. In Japan, Halloween is mostly a costume and street-party thing for teens and adults, big in places like Shibuya, rather than the trick-or-treating door-to-door tradition American kids grow up with.
For younger kids it shows up more at English schools, daycares, and themed cafes than on the neighborhood streets. Coloring pages travel well for that, since a cute ghost is a cute ghost in any language.
Do kids have halloween off?
Not in most places. October 31st is a regular school day in the US and much of the world, so kids are in class during the day and celebrate in the evening once homework and dinner are done.
The exception is when the 31st lands on a weekend, which kids absolutely cheer for, because it means a full day of costume and candy with no math worksheet in between.
Do kids get halloween off?
No, they go to school like any other day. I know it feels like it should be a day off given how much buildup there is, but the candy and costumes happen after the bell rings.
If you want the day to feel special anyway, I print a couple of coloring pages for the after-school stretch before trick-or-treating starts. It bridges that restless hour between getting home and the sun finally going down.
Before You Print
Every one of these has crayon on it somewhere in my house right now. Some are taped to windows, one is folded into a sad little booklet in the car, a few got colored entirely purple by a determined three-year-old.
Print the ones that fit your kid. Buy the heavier paper if you want them to last, skip it if they are headed for the recycling by November. And keep a spare orange crayon hidden, because you will run out at the worst possible moment.