Word searchesChristmas
Christmas word search
A Christmas word search that picks its words from a list of 32, from STAR and ELF to NUTCRACKER and GINGERBREAD. It works for children on school break, family gatherings and holiday cards that need an activity tucked inside.
- Type your details or print blank
- Answer key on its own page
- Print or PDF, Letter or A4
- Free, no sign-up
On this page
December brings a lot of waiting: for guests, for dinner, for the morning itself. A word search is easy to carry and needs only a pencil, so it suits a car trip to relatives as well as a quiet corner of the living room. This page opens with the Christmas theme at Medium.
What prints
The sheet is titled "Christmas Word Search". An instruction line follows, naming the number of hidden words and their directions. The grid comes next, set inside a boxed frame, and under it the words are listed in columns with a tick box beside each. A second page is the answer key, where each found word is ringed and bolded and the rest of the letters are printed pale.
Every time you press New puzzle the computer chooses a fresh subset of the list and places the words again, so two prints from the same page will not match. That makes it practical to print a stack for a group and still have everyone working on a different grid.
Words you may meet
The list mixes the short and the long. Short words include STAR, SNOW, GIFT, BELL, TREE, SLED, CANE, ELF and HOLLY. Longer picks include REINDEER, STOCKING, ORNAMENT, SNOWFLAKE, POINSETTIA, NORTHPOLE and EVERGREEN. MISTLETOE, FIREPLACE and GINGERBREAD are the kind of words that run most of the way across a Medium grid, which makes them easy to spot once you know to look for the long ones first.
The settings
- Title (optional): swap in a family name or event, for example "Nguyen Family Christmas Eve".
- Theme: pre-set to Christmas; the drop-down holds 30 topics plus a custom-words choice.
- Difficulty: start at Easy (10 × 10, only across and down), step up to Medium (14 × 14, diagonals, 16 words) or finish at Hard (17 × 17, backwards words, 22 words).
- Large print: a 12 × 12 grid, no more than 12 words, larger letters.
- Lowercase letters: lowercase for both the grid and the list.
Ideas for the holidays
Use the Large print option for a grandparent who no longer reads small type comfortably. Put a Hard grid on the table at dinner and let a team of cousins solve it together before dessert. Teachers can tuck an Easy sheet into a last-day-before-break packet, and parents can add the puzzle to a card or a stocking.
Worked example: a family gathering on Christmas Eve
Marisol prints six copies for the cousins, three Medium and three Large print, each with a title reading "Abuela's Christmas Eve". She hands out pencils at 4 p.m. while dinner finishes cooking. The first puzzle includes SLEIGH, WREATH, CHIMNEY and ELF, and the smallest cousin finds ELF in the second row because it is only three letters long.
The prize is not much: whoever completes the list first gets to choose the first carol. Afterward Marisol keeps the answer pages to settle one argument about whether CANDLE ran upward or downward. It ran upward on a diagonal, so the Medium rules were honored, and nobody had found it because they were scanning only across.
More holiday puzzles
Pair this sheet with the Christmas crossword or the Christmas word scramble, which use the same word family. To add family names and traditions to the list, build one in the word search maker.