Santa Claus Coloring Page

About this coloring page

Santa waving, with a sack of presents beside him. Everybody knows what color the suit is, which is exactly why this page is easy to start and worth interrupting once. The beard and the fur trim are large white areas that most children leave white, and leaving them is the right instinct: white against red is what makes the figure read from across a room. The sack is a single big shape that fills in seconds. The belt buckle and boots are the smallest parts and the ones best saved until a child has warmed up on the coat. There is no background, so a child who wants to fill the whole sheet with color can do it, and a child who wants to stop at the figure has a finished picture either way. It prints cleanly at A4 on ordinary paper, and because it is plain black line art on white it uses very little ink even in a stack. A santa coloring sheet is worth printing several of: the same drawing colored by four different children makes a better display than four different drawings.

Color suggestions

• Red suit, white fur trim
• Black belt and boots
• Brown or green sack
• Leave the beard white

Did you know?

• Santa was drawn in a red suit decades before Coca-Cola used him in advertising. The cartoonist Thomas Nast drew him that way through the 1860s and 1870s in Harper's Weekly.
• The figure is descended from Saint Nicholas, a fourth-century bishop in what is now Turkey, whose feast day on 6 December is still when children in parts of Europe receive their presents.