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It rained the whole second Saturday of October last year. Loud on the gutters, the good kind. My sister’s crew was over so the big kids could carve their pumpkin at the kitchen table, which left me with the smallest one. My niece. Two and a half, opinions like a forty year old, zero interest in pumpkin guts.
So we set up on the living room floor. Old fleece blanket, the plastic bucket of crayons I keep for exactly this, and a stack of Halloween pages I had printed that morning on plain copy paper. Do not waste cardstock on a toddler. She colored a smiling pumpkin solid purple, told me it was soup, and stayed put for forty minutes. Forty. I checked the clock twice because I did not believe it.
Every set below is a file from an indie design shop, so you print what you need and skip the rest. The trick at this age is thick lines and friendly faces, and I will flag which sets have them and which are really for the grown-ups on the blanket. Some links are affiliate links, so if you grab one I might get a small cut. Costs you nothing. Crayons out.
The Smiling Ghost Pack That Bought Me Forty Minutes
This is the set the purple soup pumpkin came from. Cutie is doing the heavy lifting in that title, everything wears a big dopey grin, the ghosts look like they want a hug, and the lines are thick enough that a two year old fist dragging a chunky crayon mostly stays inside them. Mostly.
I printed eight pages before breakfast and she got through five. The bat with the round ears was the favorite, requested again by pointing and yelling. One nitpick: a few pages have small background stars a toddler will ignore completely, so do not expect her to color every inch. She does the face and moves on. That is the whole transaction.
Round Two of the Cuties, Because She Noticed
Same shop energy, different batch of characters, and yes I bought the second set because my niece flipped through the finished pile looking for new faces and gave me a look. This one leans harder into pumpkins and little monsters, still all smiles, nothing that reads scary even to a kid who is scared of the vacuum.
If you only get one of the two cutie sets, take whichever thumbnail grabs you, they are close cousins. I keep both in a desktop folder labeled RAINY DAY and reprint the favorites. The candy corn page has been printed six times now. She has never once finished it. The orange crayon snapped on attempt three and we held a small moment of silence.
Two Hundred Witch Cats, and She Meows at Every One
Cats in witch hats. That is the pitch, two hundred times over, and for a toddler who meows at the neighbor’s actual cat through the window, this was a hit before the first page left the printer.
Not all two hundred are toddler-simple. Maybe a third have fat clean outlines, the rest get detailed, so scroll the set, print the simple ones for the little kid, and hand the fancy ones to whoever is eight and feeling superior. My sister took three for herself and colored them at the kitchen table between pumpkin duties. Nobody judged her out loud.
Skeletons That Somehow Are Not Scary
I hesitated on this one. Skeletons plus a toddler could go either way. But these are goofy, dancing, round-skulled skeletons, and my niece decided the tall one was a doggy, so that settled that.
Same deal as the cats, it is a huge set with a real range. Some pages are basically three fat shapes, others have ribcage detail that will frustrate small hands. I printed four of the simplest, she scribbled a green blob over one and said done with total finality. Fine. Copy paper. A short attention span costs nothing. The rain kept going and we kept printing.
The Mandalas Are for You, Not the Toddler
Let me be clear, no two year old is coloring a mandala. This set is here because if you are on the floor supervising crayons for an hour, you deserve a page of your own, and a pumpkin mandala plus one decent pen is weirdly calming while the rain works on the window.
I got through about a quarter of a spiderweb one that afternoon, in stolen thirty second stretches between crayon retrievals from the bucket. Print these on the heavier paper, 65 lb at least. Felt tips bleed straight through copy paper and you will find the ghost of your mandala on the next page down. Ask me how I know.
The Big Cute Bundle I Ration Until November
Two hundred pages of round pumpkins, baby bats, candy, ghosts with stubby arms. This is the volume play. When one file covers every rainy afternoon in October, you stop guarding pages and let the kid crumple a few, which honestly is half of toddler coloring anyway.
The range inside is wide, some pages sit right at the two year old level and some fit a five year old better, so this is the one I would grab for a house with mixed ages. My gripe: it is one giant PDF, and scrolling to find page 147 on a tired laptop takes patience. I printed my shortlist once and saved it as its own file. Ten minutes, saved my sanity.
A Hundred Pages for the Grown-Up on the Blanket
Yes, an adult set in a toddler roundup. Hear me out. My sister wandered in from pumpkin carving with a mug of cider, sat down on the blanket, and asked if there was anything for her. There was. She took a haunted house page with actual shading detail and stayed twenty minutes past the pumpkin.
These are detailed but not dark. No gore, just dense pumpkins and witchy scenes. Paper matters more here, thin paper plus a hundred tiny sections equals tears in both senses. One page had a moon so packed with linework she quit and colored it solid navy. It still looked good on the fridge next to the purple soup.
The Second Adult Set, for When the Kids Nap
Different shop, same idea, slightly moodier art than the hundred pack. More twisted trees, more full-page scenes. This is my after-bedtime set. Toddler down, kettle on, one page, no phone.
A nitpick I mean sincerely: a few pages run the art right to the paper’s edge, and most home printers will not print borderless, so you lose a sliver of branch or hat brim. I stopped caring by page three. The raven page ended up taped inside my office door where I see it every morning, trimmed edge and all.
Easy for Adults Means Just Right for Big Siblings
The secret about sets labeled easy for adults: they are the sweet spot for kids around six to nine. Bolder lines than the fancy adult stuff, more going on than the toddler pages, so when the pumpkin carvers finished and drifted into the living room, these kept them from raiding the toddler’s crayon bucket.
My nephew colored a cauldron page in exactly two colors, black and more black, and declared it metal. Regular paper works for kids, go heavier if markers are involved. The bucket ran low on green by four o’clock. Nobody missed it, everything that afternoon came out orange or purple anyway.
The Horror Volume Stays on a High Shelf
Full honesty, this one is not for your two year old. It is proper horror art, shadowy figures and unsettling faces, and it earns its spot here because somebody in your house is thirteen or thirty and will feel deeply seen by it. Print it after the little kids are asleep.
Mine lives clipped in a folder on the bookshelf, well above bucket height, ever since my niece pulled a half-finished witch page off the coffee table and studied it a little too quietly. No tears, but we swapped it for a smiling ghost fast. If your teens think the cute stuff is beneath them, this is the one file in the list they will use without being asked.
Frequently Asked Questions
Do kids get halloween off school?
In the US, mostly no. Halloween is not a school holiday, so most kids sit through a full day on October 31 and the fun starts after the bell. Plenty of elementary schools do a costume parade or a class party in the last hour, which is its own kind of chaos, but an actual day off is rare.
A few districts do schedule a teacher workday or fall break near the end of October, and parents treat it like a Halloween bonus. Check your district calendar in September, not on the 30th. I planned a daytime craft afternoon once without checking and had exactly zero children available.
Do kids celebrate halloween in japan?
Sort of, but it looks different. Halloween in Japan skews adult, think big costume street events like the Shibuya crowds, and door to door trick-or-treating is not really a thing in most neighborhoods.
Kids there mostly meet Halloween through school English programs, mall events, and theme parks doing seasonal runs. Coloring pages travel well for that, actually. A friend who teaches English in Osaka prints cute pumpkin pages for her youngest classes every October, since a smiling ghost needs no translation and scares nobody.
Do kids have halloween off?
Same answer in a different hat: generally no. October 31 is a normal school day in the US, Canada, and the UK. The whole celebration gets squeezed into the evening, which is why little kids are feral by seven pm. They have been waiting through math for this.
When it lands on a weekend, that is your day off, and those years are easier with toddlers. Daylight trick-or-treating, earlier candy, earlier bedtime.
Do kids get halloween off?
No, and I keep thinking they picked the wrong day to protect anyway. November 1 is the one that deserves a holiday. Kids run on sugar and four hours of sleep, and every teacher I know calls it the hardest morning of the fall.
The practical move: plan the quiet stuff, like coloring on the living room floor, for the weekend before Halloween instead of the day itself. That is exactly how the rainy Saturday with my niece happened, and it beat the actual holiday. No costume meltdown, no schedule, just crayons and a bucket.
Before You Print
The blanket got folded up around five, the rain quit around six, and the purple soup pumpkin is still on my fridge in August because I cannot bring myself to take it down. Total cost of that afternoon: some copy paper, one snapped orange crayon, and a couple of files that will get reprinted every October until she outgrows them. She will not outgrow them soon. She still meows at the cat.
Start with one cutie set and the witch cats. Print five pages on whatever paper is already in the machine, and keep the crayons in something with a handle so cleanup is one scoop. Everything else here is expansion for after the first stack works. It will.