Every December there is a moment, usually about half past ten at night with the sellotape stuck to your sleeve, when you realise nobody knows which parcel is whose. You write on a bit of leftover paper. It falls off. Somebody opens the wrong thing.
Gift tags are a very small problem with a very easy fix, and buying them is faintly annoying — six tags in a packet, four of which you do not like. So I have made you thirty-six instead. Four printable sheets, nine tags to a sheet, thirty-six different designs, every one with a proper To and From line.
They are free, they print on ordinary paper or card, and they are deliberately simple — clean line drawings in cranberry, forest green and old gold, so they sit happily on brown paper, on white, on anything. Grab them just below, then read on for how to print and cut them so they actually look good.
Grab your 36 free printable Christmas gift tags
Pop your email into the box below and I’ll send the four printable sheets straight over. Print them, cut them, punch the little circle and tie.
What’s inside the free set
Twelve motifs, drawn as simple outlines: a little tree, a star, a holly sprig, a bauble, a snowflake, a candy cane, a wreath, a wrapped present, a bell, an evergreen sprig, a stocking and a bunch of mistletoe.
Each motif appears three times across the set, once with each greeting — Merry Christmas, With love and Just for you — and in a different colour each time. Twelve motifs times three greetings is thirty-six tags, and no two are the same.
Why three greetings and not one
Because not every parcel is a Christmas parcel. With love does birthdays, thank-yous and the present you hand over in January because you forgot. Just for you is the one to use on a gift that is a bit personal and would look odd with a snowman on it.
How to print gift tags that do not come out wrong
Nine times out of ten, a printable that comes out too small or too pale is a settings problem rather than a file problem. Four things to change:
- Turn off Fit to Page. Print at 100% or Actual Size. This is the single most common reason tags come out shrunken.
- Set the paper type to match what is in the tray. Matte Photo Paper for card, Plain for ordinary paper. The printer lays down a different amount of ink for each.
- Choose High or Best quality, not Draft. Draft is what makes the outlines look grey and furry.
- Feed card one sheet at a time, through the rear tray if your printer has one.
If you print a lot of my templates and would like all of this on one page next to the printer, there is a whole printing guide with a free cheat sheet that goes into the paper weights properly.
What paper to use
Ordinary printer paper works, and if you are tying tags to soft parcels it is honestly fine. For tags that survive being posted, 200 to 250gsm card is the sweet spot — stiff enough to hold a punched hole, thin enough that a home printer will still take it.
Kraft or brown card is lovely with these particular designs, because the colours are muted enough not to fight it. Do bear in mind that brown card will dull the gold tags a little.
Cutting, punching and tying
Cut along the dotted lines. A guillotine or a craft knife against a metal ruler gives a much crisper edge than scissors, but scissors are perfectly allowed — go slowly on the corners and the eye forgives a lot.
Every tag has a small circle printed at the top. That is where the hole goes. A standard 6mm punch lands neatly on it; if you only have a bigger punch, move it a couple of millimetres further from the edge than feels right, or the hole will tear out the first time somebody tugs it.
Rounding the corners
Snipping the top two corners off at an angle turns a rectangle into a proper luggage-label shape in about two seconds a tag, and it is the thing that makes a home-printed tag stop looking home-printed. A corner rounder does the same job on all four.
Pretty ways to tie them on
Baker’s twine is the obvious one and it does look good. So does garden string, thin ribbon, a strip of the wrapping paper itself cut narrow, or embroidery thread if you have a box of it left over from something.
Tuck a sprig of something under the knot — rosemary, a bit of fir, a cinnamon stick — and a plain brown parcel is suddenly the nicest one under the tree. Dried orange slices are traditional and smell wonderful, though they do go soft if the room is warm.
Which tag suits which parcel
This sounds like overthinking a gift tag, and it is, but it takes ten seconds and it is the reason a wrapped pile looks considered rather than assorted. A rough guide:
- Cranberry tags on brown kraft paper, or on anything green. They are the warmest of the three and they carry a big parcel well.
- Forest green tags on red, on white, and on any patterned paper that is already busy — green settles a loud print down.
- Old gold tags on white, cream and pale grey, where they read as quietly expensive. Avoid gold on gold; it disappears.
- The stocking, the bell and the candy cane are the most obviously festive, so save those for children’s parcels and the ones under the tree.
- The sprig, the mistletoe and the wreath are the quietest, which makes them the right ones for the teacher, the neighbour and your mother-in-law.
If you are wrapping for someone who makes things, the tag is also a small chance to be specific — and there are more ideas along those lines in my Christmas gift ideas for artists, which is where I send everyone who asks me what to buy a painter.
Do it as one job, not thirty small ones
The mistake is printing tags as you need them. Wrapping is a stop-start job already, and getting up to fight the printer in the middle of it is how a pleasant evening turns into a chore.
Print all four sheets in one go on a quiet evening in late November. Cut them all, punch them all, thread a length of twine through each one and put the finished tags in an envelope with the wrapping paper. By the time December arrives, the tags are the part you no longer have to think about.
Storing them so they last
Keep them flat. A large envelope, a poly pocket or an old chocolate box all work; what does not work is a drawer, where they curl and pick up creases along the punched hole. Printed tags keep perfectly well from one year to the next, so print the whole set even if you only need a dozen — the rest are next Christmas already done.
Other things to do with them
Tags make very good place cards. Write the name on the To line, lay one on each plate, and the table is done. They are also the easiest advent countdown there is: number twenty-four of them on the back and peg them along a string.
If you keep a journal, they are ideal tuck-ins — a tag is exactly the right size to hold a December memory, and it slides into a pocket page beautifully. There are more festive papers to go with them in the Christmas junk journal spreads post, and a free starter set with it.
And if you would rather draw your own motifs than print mine, twenty easy Christmas doodles will give you plenty to copy onto a blank tag.
If you want tags that are not Christmassy
This set is Christmas only, on purpose. If you need birthday tags, thank-you tags and blank write-your-own ones as well, the older free printable gift tags set covers the whole year in one PDF. Between the two you are set for every parcel you will wrap.
Frequently asked questions
Can I sell things with these tags on?
Print as many as you like for your own gifts, your family’s gifts and your classroom. Please do not sell the tags themselves or the file, and please do not hand the PDF on — send people to this page instead and they can get their own.
How big are the tags?
Nine to an A4 sheet, so a little under 6cm wide and just over 8cm tall — a standard luggage-label size. Printed at 100% they will fit a shop-bought tag punch if you have one.
Can I print them in black and white?
Yes, and they hold up well because everything is line work rather than solid fill. Choose greyscale in your printer dialogue rather than letting it convert on the fly, and the outlines stay crisp.
Are these all right for children to colour in?
They are, and it is a good rainy-afternoon job. Print them in black and white, hand over the felt tips, and let them sign the From line themselves.
Will they use a lot of ink?
No. There are no solid blocks of colour anywhere in the set, which was deliberate — it is all outline work on a cream ground, so a full sheet of nine tags uses about as much ink as a page of text.
Before you go
Print one sheet tonight, before the wrapping starts rather than during it. Nine tags takes about four minutes and it is the difference between a calm hour with the radio on and that sellotape-on-the-sleeve moment in December.
And if you enjoy making your own Christmas paper things, all my printable kits live in the Artsydee Creations Club, with a new one every month.