Children Hanging Stockings By A Fireplace Coloring Page

Two children reach up to a mantel to hang stockings, one on tiptoe, with a fire burning in the grate below them and a few decorations along the shelf. The drawing style is uncluttered, the fire is a handful of clear flame shapes rather than a mass of texture, and there is generous white space inside every stocking. Four to eight year olds will manage it happily.

The stockings are the natural place to spend effort. Give each one a different treatment, a candy stripe on one and a zigzag on the other, then add a white cuff at the top of both so they look like knitted wool. For the fire, work orange around the outside of each flame and yellow at the center rather than the other way round, which is how flames actually read to the eye.

Stockings by the fire come from a story about Saint Nicholas dropping gold through a window at night. It landed in socks that had been left hanging to dry, and the detail stuck fast enough to survive seventeen centuries.