Christmas ornament prompts by age
“Use this prompt” fills in the generator and sets the detail level. Every page is drawn fresh, so if one misses, change one detail and try again.
| For | Prompt | Action |
|---|---|---|
| Ages 2 to 5Simple | one big round Christmas ornament with a bow at the top and nothing drawn on the ball, big simple shapes, no background An empty ball. The child draws the pattern and colors it, so no two ornaments match. |
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| Ages 3 to 6Simple | three round ornaments hanging from a branch, each with a different stripe or dot pattern, big simple shapes Three balls with simple patterns, each one a separate area to color. |
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| Ages 6 to 9Medium | a round Christmas ornament with a big snowflake in the center ringed by small dots, hanging from a bow One clear design with a ring of dots, which gives careful colorers something to do. |
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| Ages 9 to 12Medium | five ornaments hanging from a garland: a ball, a star, a bell, a candy cane and a gingerbread man Five different shapes, so the page can become a set of tree decorations. |
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| Teens and adultsDetailed | three round Christmas ornaments with ornate flower and swirl patterns hanging from a pine branch Dense pattern inside round shapes, the same kind of page as a mandala. |
From coloring page to tree ornament
Every page downloads as a letter-size PDF, and your printer's “pages per sheet” setting shrinks it without any editing:
- Print on cardstock. Plain paper goes limp on a tree. Cardstock keeps its shape.
- Four to a sheet. At 4 pages per sheet each picture comes out just under 4 inches across, a good size for a tree.
- Cut around the outline, punch a hole and tie on ribbon. Color the back too, or glue two pages back to back so the ornament has no blank side.
Print the blank ornament for a whole class. Each child's ball is different, and the finished set looks like a real tree of glass baubles.
Where glass ornaments come from
Mold-blown glass ornaments were first made in Lauscha, a small glassmaking town in Germany. F. W. Woolworth's stores began selling Lauscha ornaments in the United States in 1880 (Wikipedia, “Christmas ornament”). Sources differ on the exact years.
Coloring a mandala-style ornament
The patterned ornaments are round, so they color like mandalas. In a 2005 experiment, 84 students who had been made briefly anxious colored a mandala, a plaid pattern or a blank sheet for 20 minutes. Anxiety fell about the same after the mandala and the plaid, and more than after the blank sheet (Curry and Kasser, Art Therapy). One small study is not a treatment, which our article on adult coloring and anxiety explains.