Coloring Books as Christmas Gifts: How to Match the Book to the Person

Every December somebody buys a coloring book for somebody else, and it goes one of two ways. It lives on the coffee table until March, or it never leaves the gift bag.

The difference is almost never the price. It’s whether the person opened the cover and saw something they already cared about.

I draw these books, so take the bias as read. But the failed coloring book gift is a specific and predictable thing, and it usually fails for the same two reasons: the pictures were about nothing in particular, and the lines were too thin to color without squinting.

Start with what they already look at

Before you think about difficulty or page count, think about what the person’s eyes land on in an ordinary week.

Somebody with a feeder outside the kitchen window is a different buyer than somebody with a garden, who is different again from somebody who keeps a sewing room. That’s the whole matching problem, and it’s easier than most gift decisions because you already know the answer.

For the bird person, Backyard Birding is the one I reach for. When I was drawing it I put a short fact next to every single bird — where it winters, what it eats, how to tell the male from the female. That was a decision, and it cost me time I could have spent adding more pages. I did it because bird people don’t just want to color a chickadee. They want to know things about the chickadee. The page becomes something to read as well as something to fill in.

The person who says they’re not creative

This is the most common objection I hear about giving art supplies as a gift, and it’s worth taking seriously rather than talking somebody out of.

People who say that are usually remembering a coloring book with a hundred hairline shapes in it, or a school art class that didn’t go well. Hand them the same thing again and you just confirm what they already believe.

Bold and easy line work solves this in a fairly unglamorous way. The shapes are big, the outlines are thick, and there’s no version of coloring one badly. If you want the longer explanation, I wrote one in what “bold and easy” actually means, and there’s a gentler starting point in the beginner’s guide.

The maker on your list

Anyone who sews, quilts, knits, or restores old things tends to like looking at the tools as much as using them.

Vintage Sewing Studios is forty scenes of exactly that — treadle machines, dress forms, spools stacked on a shelf, the mid-century workroom nobody has anymore. Drawing it meant simplifying a lot of Victorian ornament down to shapes a person can actually color, without flattening it into something generic.

For the plant person, Modern Botanicals is the same idea in a different room.

The one who feeds everybody

There’s always one. The aunt whose kitchen everyone ends up in, the friend who cooks when something bad happens.

Brown Sugar & Cast Iron is soul food and kitchens and the ordinary warmth of cooking for people you love. Brown Sugar & Kin is the family side of it — forty-five designs of home and togetherness, with an affirmation set beside them.

I started this store wanting to make coloring books that didn’t stress people out. The Brown Sugar Collection came later, after I spent enough time in the adult coloring aisle to notice it was mostly mandalas, castles, and fairies, and almost nothing that looked like my family or my kitchen. The longer story is here.

Mara at Home is the newest book in that line — forty pages of one woman at home, natural hair, locs and braids, drawn against African patterns. Nothing on those pages is pre-shaded. Skin tone and hair color belong to whoever is holding the pencil, and I wasn’t going to make that call for them.

The one who still knows all the verses

A churchgoing parent or grandparent is one of the most common people on a Christmas list and one of the hardest to buy for. They’ll tell you they don’t need anything, and they’ll mean it.

Hymns of Grace is fifty hymns set in large bold letters above simple country scenes. The words sit on the page with the picture instead of underneath it, so there’s something to read as well as something to fill in — the same thinking as the facts in the bird book. Large print throughout, single-sided, nothing fiddly.

Buying for a parent or grandparent

Large print stops being a nice-to-have around the time reading glasses show up.

Thin outlines and cramped detail ask an older eye to do work it doesn’t want to do, and they ask a hand with any stiffness in it to be precise. Thick lines and open shapes remove both problems. I’ve written this up properly for seniors and for low vision.

One honest caveat. If the person you’re buying for has memory loss, subject matter matters more than difficulty, and some subjects land badly. That deserves its own guide rather than a paragraph, so read coloring books for dementia before you choose.

For Christmas specifically I made December Days. Like Mara at Home and Hymns of Grace, it’s printed at 8.5 by 11 rather than square, because the bigger sheet gives me room for larger pictures with thicker lines — which is what older eyes need. One large picture per page, with a memory prompt printed on the facing page so there’s something to talk about while you color. I’ve written up how to give it, and how to ask the questions without turning them into a test.

The kid who’s going to want in anyway

Buy the adult the book they’ll like and buy the kid one too, or you’ll be sharing.

Bold & Easy Sea Creatures and Veggies Gone Wild are the two that hold a young child’s attention, because the shapes are big enough that a five-year-old’s version looks good and a grandparent can color the page beside them without either of them getting bored. The Kids’ Cute Bundle in the shop puts four of those books together if you have more than one child to cover.

If you’re buying it because they’re having a hard year

Be a little careful here, and I say that as somebody who sells these.

Coloring is a good way to spend an hour not looking at a screen. It is not treatment, and the marketing in this category blurs that line constantly — half the books on the shelf have the words “art therapy” printed somewhere on the cover. The American Art Therapy Association is direct about it: the association does not discourage coloring for recreation and self-care, but says coloring activities “must be distinguished from art therapy services provided by a credentialed art therapist.”

That sentence is the reason I write my own book descriptions the way I do. I’ll tell you a book is relaxing. I won’t tell you it treats anything.

Here is what one can do, though.

My sister bought Brown Sugar & Kin not long after our mother passed. Nobody gave it to her. She went and bought it herself, because she wanted to sit with something that felt like family.

She told me she cried when she opened it. She knew right away which page was her and me. She was right.

So the honest version is better anyway. You’re not handing someone a cure. You’re handing them an hour with their hands busy and their phone face down, and sometimes a picture that turns out to be about them.

The parts people forget until it’s too late

Pages printed on both sides bleed through the moment a marker touches them, and half the book becomes unusable. Every book we publish is single-sided with a black backing page for that reason — here is why that matters more than it sounds like it does.

Markers make a better gift than the book alone. A cheap set that bleeds will sour the whole thing, so I keep a current list of what works.

And if you’re reading this in the third week of December, the printable version is the move. Every book in the shop is available as an instant-download PDF, which means no shipping deadline, no tracking number, and the option to print a handful of pages tonight. It also travels. You can send it to someone overseas without paying more in postage than the gift is worth.

What I’d put in the bag

One book chosen because of what’s inside it, not because it was on sale. A set of markers that won’t bleed. That’s a gift somebody actually uses in January, instead of one they thank you for in December.