Halloween coloring pages

Browse our 10 free printable Halloween coloring pages below. Halloween falls on 31 October, the eve of All Saints' Day, and grew out of the Gaelic harvest festival Samhain before Irish and Scottish emigrants carried it to North America. Our Halloween coloring pages include carved jack-o'-lantern pumpkins and a friendly young witch with her broom, drawn with bold outlines and large open shapes. Free printable Halloween sheets in PDF and PNG for A4 and US Letter paper.

Halloween coloring pages — free printables

Where the name comes from

Halloween is short for All Hallows' Eve, the evening before All Saints' Day on 1 November. The date and much of the atmosphere come from Samhain, the Gaelic festival that marked the end of the harvest and the beginning of winter. Irish and Scottish emigrants took the customs with them to North America during the nineteenth century, and it was there that Halloween grew into the costume-and-candy night now kept in much of the world.

Why pumpkins

The first carved lanterns were not pumpkins at all. In Ireland and Scotland people hollowed out turnips, beets and potatoes, cut faces into them and set a candle or an ember inside. Pumpkins are native to North America, and once the tradition crossed the Atlantic people found them far larger and softer to carve than a turnip. The pumpkin took over so completely that most of us now assume it came first.

Witches and broomsticks

The oldest known picture of witches riding broomsticks appears in a manuscript made in 1451, illustrating Martin Le Franc's poem Le Champion des Dames. In the margin two figures travel through the air, one seated on a household broom and the other on a plain wooden stick. The drawing is older than the worst of the European witch trials, so the flying broom was already a familiar idea before those trials began.

Trick-or-treating

Going from door to door in disguise is older than the phrase used for it. Scottish children were recorded guising in the late nineteenth century, dressing up and offering a song, a poem or a joke in return for food or coins. The words "trick or treat" turn up in print for the first time in 1927, in a newspaper in Alberta, Canada, describing children calling at houses on Halloween night.

What you will find here

The collection covers the classic Halloween subjects. There are two carved pumpkins, one detailed and one simplified with fewer lines for younger children, and a smiling young witch in a buckled pointed hat holding her broom. Every sheet downloads free as a PDF or a PNG and prints on A4 or US Letter paper.