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My niece is six and she has opinions. The pumpkin has to be smiling, the ghost cannot be scary, and the cat must be purple, which is not a color cats come in, but I do not make the rules at her table. Every October she comes over for a Saturday and we color until the crayon bin is a wreck and there is orange on the chair that I am pretty sure is permanent now.
The trick I learned the hard way: print these on regular copy paper, not cardstock. I tried 110 lb once because I thought thicker was fancier and the marker bled and sat on top and she got frustrated. Plain 24 lb paper drinks the crayon and washes the marker right in. Cheaper too, which matters when one afternoon eats fifteen pages.
These are the coloring sets I keep coming back to, sorted from the sweet stuff to a whole cat book. A couple of the links are affiliate links, so if you grab one I get a tiny cut at no extra cost to you. That is it. Grab your crayon bin.
The Sweet Set for the Kid Who Hates Scary
This was the peace treaty. My niece will not touch anything with fangs or a real spiderweb, and this set is all soft round pumpkins and friendly little bats with the kind of faces that could not frighten a moth. She colored three of them in one sitting and asked for more, which never happens.
I printed the lot on plain paper and clipped them to the fridge with magnets shaped like vegetables. They held up fine. One small gripe: a couple of the pages have pretty fine line work around the candy, so a chunky toddler crayon goes outside the lines a lot. For a six year old with a thin marker, no problem at all.
If you have a kid who cries at the spooky aisle, start here. It is the gentlest one in the bunch and it bought me twenty quiet minutes.
Big-Eyed Kawaii Pages That Print Forever
Kawaii means the ghosts have giant shiny eyes and tiny arms and everything looks like it wants a hug. My partner thinks they are too cute. My niece thinks he is wrong and so do I. These printed crisp even on the last gasp of a black ink cartridge that I have been threatening to replace since spring.
The shapes are big and open, which is the whole point with little hands. She filled a smiling ghost in flat rainbow colors and then drew her own candy raining down around it. The file gave her room to do that. Nothing was so detailed that she felt boxed in.
One nitpick, the borders run close to the page edge, so if your printer has a fat margin like my old one, you lose a sliver off the bottom. I did not notice until the second page. After that I bumped the print to fit and it was fine.
Twenty Pages, One Rainy Weekend Solved
Twenty sheets in one download. I bought this the year it rained the entire last week of October and the kids next door came over and there was nothing to do and I was losing my mind. I printed the whole batch, spread them on the kitchen table, and put the crayon bin in the middle like a centerpiece.
The variety is the win here. Pumpkins, a haunted house, witches, a skeleton that is more goofy than grim. Three kids picked different pages and nobody fought, which is the actual measure of a good coloring set. By page eleven the table looked like a craft store exploded and I did not care.
The only thing I would flag, a few of the busier pages have a lot going on in one scene, so a younger kid might tap out halfway. I let mine skip those and circle back. No harm done, and twenty pages means you can afford to be picky.
The Second Kawaii Stack I Print for Sleepovers
Yes, another kawaii set, and yes, I keep both. This one leans a little more into pumpkins and candy corn while the other one is heavier on ghosts, so between the two I never run out when a sleepover turns into four kids and a sugar crash at nine pm.
The line weight is thick and forgiving. My friend’s three year old got hold of one of these with a fat crayon and managed to stay mostly inside the outlines, which is a small miracle I witnessed personally. The art is warm and round and there is nothing sharp or busy to frustrate a little one.
My one quibble is that a few pages repeat a similar candy motif, so if you print all of them in a row a sharp kid will notice the doubles. I just shuffled in some pages from the ghost set and nobody was the wiser.
Friendly Ghosts the Toddlers Could Not Ruin
All ghosts, all friendly, all big simple shapes. This is the one I hand to the youngest kid at the table, the one who is more interested in eating the crayon than using it. The ghost outlines are so bold and clean that even a wild scribble inside them reads as a colored ghost, which keeps the small one proud and busy.
My sister borrowed a few of these for her daughter’s preschool and the teacher asked where they came from. I printed a fresh stack on plain paper and sent them along. They photocopy clean too, which the teacher mentioned later because she ran off a class set.
The nitpick: these are simple by design, so an older kid who wants detail will color one and shrug. That is fine. This file is doing one job for one age group and it does it well.
More Ghosts, Because One Page Is Never Enough
This is the companion to the other ghost set, same cheerful round spooks but a fresh batch of poses, a ghost holding a pumpkin, a ghost in a little hat, a ghost that appears to be waving hello. My niece named one of them Gary and now Gary is a recurring character in our October.
I taped Gary, fully colored in a violent shade of green, to the kitchen window where he stayed all month. The paper curled a little near the radiator by week three, but that is a radiator problem, not a file problem. The print itself was sharp and the lines were dark and easy to follow.
My only note is that the two ghost sets overlap in spirit, so if you are buying both, space them out across the month rather than printing them back to back. Kids notice when the ghosts start to rhyme.
The Mixed Bag I Reach For First
This is my default. When a kid shows up unannounced and I have no plan, I open this file and print the first four pages and we are off. It is a general Halloween mix, a witch, a pumpkin patch, a bat or two, nothing locked to one theme, so it works for almost any kid at the door.
The lines are a comfortable medium weight, not so fine that a crayon struggles and not so chunky that an older kid feels babied. My nephew is nine and thinks coloring is beneath him, and he still quietly finished the haunted house page while pretending he was only doing it to be polite.
One small thing, the file is a single mixed set, so you do not get the sheer page count of the twenty pack. For a quick afternoon it is plenty. For a long rainy weekend you might pair it with something bigger.
The Companion Pack That Fills the Gaps
Same family as the one above, different pages, so I treat the two as one big set. When I run through the first file I just pull from this one and the kids never clock that we switched downloads. The art style matches closely, which is exactly why I bought the pair.
I printed a stack of these for a classroom party my sister was running. Twenty kids, one printer, a tight Friday morning. The pages came off the printer fast and clean and the bold outlines meant even the kids who rush had something that looked finished by the time the bell rang.
The nitpick is the same as its sibling, you are buying a tidy handful, not a giant volume. But two handfuls together gave me more than enough to get through a whole party with leftovers.
Volume One That Earned a Three-Ring Binder
The VOL-1 in the name made me laugh, like it is a comic series, but honestly the pages are good enough that I gave them their own binder. I print a fresh set each October and slide the colored ones into plastic sleeves so my niece can flip through her past years. She has a whole archive now.
The drawings here have a hand-drawn looseness I like, witches with crooked hats, pumpkins that lean. Nothing stiff. My niece said the cat on page three looked grumpy and colored it bright pink as punishment, which is the kind of project commitment I respect.
My one gripe is that the file is an older release and a couple of pages are sized a touch large, so I had to nudge the scale to keep a witch’s hat from getting clipped. Two seconds in the print dialog and it was sorted.
A Whole Cat Book for the Cat-Obsessed Child
If you have a kid who only wants to color cats, this is the one. A full coloring book of Halloween cats, black cats in witch hats, cats curled on pumpkins, a cat riding a tiny broom that my niece declared her favorite thing in the world. She colored that one purple, naturally, because cats at her table are always the wrong color.
Because it is a book and not loose pages, I printed it double sided and stapled it into an actual little booklet she could carry around. She brought it to her grandma’s and colored half of it in the car. That portability is the selling point for me, one staple and it travels.
The nitpick, double sided printing means a heavy marker can ghost through to the back, so I told her to stick with crayons in the booklet. With crayons it was perfect and she finished the whole thing by the second week of October.
Frequently Asked Questions
Do kids get halloween off school?
No, Halloween is not a school holiday in the US, so most kids are in class on October 31st and trick or treat after the bell. Some schools throw a class party or a costume parade during the day, which is exactly when a stack of these coloring pages comes in handy for the teacher.
If the 31st lands on a weekday, expect a normal school day followed by a very sugar-fueled evening. Plan the coloring for after dinner while the candy haul gets sorted.
Do kids celebrate halloween in japan?
Sort of, but differently. Halloween in Japan is more of a young-adult street and costume event, big in places like Shibuya, and it is less about kids going door to door for candy the way they do in the US.
That said, the cute kawaii style of coloring really took off there, which is part of why those big-eyed ghost and pumpkin pages feel so charming. Kids anywhere can color them, no trick or treating required.
Do kids have halloween off?
Generally no. Halloween falls on a regular calendar day and schools stay open, so kids do not get the day off the way they would for a national holiday.
The exception is when the 31st hits a weekend, then it is just a free Saturday or Sunday and you have all day to color, carve, and get into costume at your own pace.
Do kids get halloween off?
Same answer, no, kids do not get Halloween off school. It is a normal day on the academic calendar in the US and most other countries that celebrate it.
What you can do is make the evening special. Print a few pages, lay out the crayons, and let them color while you wait for it to get dark enough to head out.
Before You Print
Here is what I have figured out after a lot of orange-stained chairs. The best coloring page is the one your specific kid will actually sit down for, and that changes by age and mood and whether they are in a ghost phase or a cat phase that week. So I keep a few of these printed and ready and let them pick.
Start with the sweet set or one of the kawaii stacks if you have a little one, grab the twenty pack for a rainy weekend, and keep the cat book in your back pocket for the kid who will not color anything else. Print on plain paper, dump out the crayons, and let them ruin a perfectly good afternoon.