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Our coloring stash lives in a battered green folder on top of the fridge, and the first week of fall I pull it down like it’s a holiday in itself. My daughter calls it the orange folder even though it’s clearly green. I gave up correcting her around year three.
The rule in my kitchen is simple. Rainy Saturday, no plans, I print a stack of pages and dump the crayon bucket on the table and we go until somebody’s hand cramps. Usually mine. The pages that survive get taped to the pantry door, the rest get mailed to grandma, who keeps every single one and pretends each is her favorite.
A lot of these started as files I grabbed online for a couple bucks from an indie design shop, printed at home, then again at the library when my printer sulked. Some of the links below are affiliate ones, so if you grab a set I might earn a tiny bit. Costs you nothing extra. Grab the crayons.
The cat pages that bought me forty quiet minutes
I printed this one on a gray Tuesday after work, expecting maybe ten minutes of peace. My son colored four black cats in a row, each with a different color belly, and narrated a whole backstory for each. The witch-hat cat got named Gerald. Gerald has lore now.
The lines are thick enough that a five year old stays inside them most of the time, which matters more than you’d think when the alternative is a meltdown over a stray scribble. I ran these on plain copy paper and they were fine. No need to splurge here.
One small gripe. A couple pages pack a lot of cats onto one sheet, so a younger kid loses steam halfway. I just cut those down the middle with kitchen scissors and handed over one cat at a time.
Gnomes, because not everything in October needs fangs
My niece is four and scared of skeletons, full stop, so the gnome set was my peace offering. Round little hats, no teeth, nothing that jumps out at her. She colored every beard purple. Every single one. I asked why and she looked at me like I was slow.
These are sweet without being syrupy, and the bigger open shapes are forgiving for a toddler death-grip on a marker. We did markers this round and the paper held up okay, only one bleed-through onto the kitchen table, which wiped off.
My nitpick is that a few of the gnomes look nearly identical at a glance, so an older kid clocks the repeats fast. For the little ones it doesn’t register at all.
Bold lines for the kid who presses too hard
My middle one colors like he’s trying to dig through the table. Tears thin pages right off. This bold-line set was made for exactly that energy. Fat outlines, big simple shapes, hard to mess up even if you go fast and furious.
I bumped these up to 65 lb paper after the copy-paper casualties of last fall, and the difference was night and day. The marker didn’t ghost through, and the finished pages stood up well enough to clip onto the fridge with magnets without flopping over.
The one thing. The shapes are so big that a detail-loving older kid finishes a page in two minutes and asks for the next. Fine for a four year old, a little plain for an eight year old.
The crowd-pleaser I print extra copies of
This is the set I reach for when my daughter has a friend over, because both kids will sit and color the same page side by side without fighting about who got the better one. That’s not nothing. Friendly little ghosts and pumpkins, nothing remotely creepy.
I keep a stack of these pre-printed in the orange folder, two of each, so I’m never scrambling when a playdate appears with zero warning. Plain paper, crayons, done. The variety is good enough that they don’t get bored three pages in.
If I’m honest a few of the faces are a touch sugary for my taste, but I’m a grown adult with opinions about ghost design and the seven year olds could not care less.
Spooky but make it cuddly
Creepy-cute is the sweet spot in our house. Just enough fang to feel like Halloween, not enough to send anyone running for the night light. My older kid loves these because they make her feel like she’s coloring the scary stuff without it actually being scary.
We took these to a rainy birthday party in early October and spread them across two folding tables. Eight kids, one crayon bucket, surprisingly little bloodshed. The designs have enough little corners and shapes to keep a six-or-seven year old genuinely busy.
Only catch is some of the detail gets tight, so the smallest hands struggle in the fiddly spots. I’d aim this one at the five-and-up crowd.
More creepy-cuties, and yes we needed both
When the first creepy-cutie set ran dry I went back for this second batch, because once my kids find a style they like they will color through it relentlessly and demand more. Different characters, same friendly-spooky vibe, so it slots right into the rotation without anyone complaining about repeats.
I printed a fresh stack the night before a friend’s sleepover and laid them out next to the snack bowl. The kids drifted over between movie scenes and colored half a page at a time, which is exactly how it goes at that age. Nobody finishes anything in one sitting.
My quibble is purely organizational. It looks so much like the first set that I genuinely lost track of which pages came from where, and now my orange folder is a glorious mess. Worth it.
The mandalas I steal for myself after bedtime
I will be honest, this one is mostly for me. Once the kids are asleep and the house goes quiet I’ll print a mandala, put on a dumb movie, and color until my eyes give out. There’s something about the repeating shapes that just shuts my brain off after a long day.
The Halloween spin on the classic mandala is subtle. Bats and webs worked into the pattern instead of slapped on top. I printed these on the heavier 110 lb stock and used gel pens, which the thick paper handled without a single bleed.
My one note is that the tiniest sections are barely bigger than a pen tip, so if your hands aren’t steady you’ll color outside the lines. I do anyway. Nobody’s grading it.
Two hundred witch cats, or how I solved the whole season
When I saw a set with two hundred pages I laughed, then bought it, because we go through coloring pages like other families go through paper towels. This pack basically covered our entire October on its own. Witch cats in hats, on brooms, curled up with little cauldrons.
The smart move with a giant file like this is to not print the whole thing. I picked twenty favorites the night the leaves started turning and printed those, then went back for more when the stash thinned. My printer thanked me.
The range is huge, which is the point, but it also means quality wanders a little from page to page. A few are clearly stronger than others. With two hundred to choose from I just skip the weak ones.
Skeletons for the kid who’s outgrown cute
My oldest decided around age nine that cute was beneath her and she wanted real spooky, thank you very much. This skeleton pack hit perfectly. Detailed bones, dancing skeletons, a few that are genuinely a little eerie in the best way.
These have enough fine detail to hold an older kid’s focus for a proper stretch, which around here is the holy grail. She did one with metallic markers over a weekend and it ended up framed in her room. Still hangs there in June.
Worth flagging that the detail makes these a no-go for little ones. My four year old took one look, declared it too scary, and went back to her purple gnomes. Know your audience.
A second mandala set for the long winter nights
After I burned through the first mandala book on my late-night habit, I grabbed this hundred-and-ten-page one to keep the supply going. Different patterns, same meditative drag-the-pen-and-forget-your-day quality. My partner has started joining me, which neither of us will admit out loud.
There’s more variety in difficulty here than the other mandala set. Some pages are open and quick, others are so dense you could spend an entire evening on one. I sort them into easy and ambitious piles before I even start.
The only thing I’d change is the page count almost feels like too much. I’ll never finish all hundred and ten, and I’ve made peace with that. We light a candle, we color a few, we call it a good night.
Frequently Asked Questions
Do kids get halloween off school?
Nope, not in the US. Halloween lands on a regular school day most years, which is why our coloring afternoons happen on the weekends around it instead.
Some schools do a costume parade or a class party during the day, but the kids still go. The serious coloring and trick-or-treating waits until they’re home.
Do kids celebrate halloween in japan?
Sort of, but not the way American kids do. In Japan Halloween skews more toward older teens and adults doing costumes and street gatherings, especially in big cities, rather than little ones going door to door for candy.
Trick-or-treating in neighborhoods isn’t really a thing there. So the printable coloring pages travel fine, but the candy run is pretty much a US and Canada tradition.
Do kids have halloween off?
Generally no. Halloween is treated as a normal day for school and most workplaces, so there’s no day off built in.
It’s why I do all my prep in the days before. A stack of pages ready in the folder means we can color the second everyone’s home, no scramble.
Do kids get halloween off?
Same answer, still no. Unless it happens to fall on a weekend that year, kids head to school like any other Tuesday.
The upside is the whole month leads up to it. We don’t wait for the actual day to break out the crayons, we color all October long.
Before You Print
That green folder I keep calling orange is fuller every year, and at this point it’s less a craft supply than a little archive of October afternoons. Crayon nubs, one gel pen that’s almost dead, the witch-cat page my son refuses to let me throw away.
Pick two or three of these, print a stack the next rainy weekend, dump the crayons on the table. My kid named a cat Gerald and now Gerald’s coming back next fall whether I like it or not.