Using our silhouette Christmas village paper template, you can build a beautiful holiday centrepiece in no time! While it looks like an intricate paper-cut craft, it doesn’t require elaborate cutting skills and is instead made with a printer.

My favourite part of Christmas isn’t the actual day, but the weeks leading to it. Decorating the house, setting up the tree, baking Christmas cookies and choosing presents for everyone in the family. Christmas day is wonderful by itself, but the whole month of December is filled with a festive atmosphere because of the little family traditions we have.

We get new flavours of hot chocolate for Christmas eve, read Christmas books, make crafts, and put together a year photo book. All around us, other people are preparing and celebrating in their own ways, and somehow thinking about it warms me. 

And this, ultimately, is what I wanted to express with this silhouette Christmas village. In all the houses, people are getting ready for Christmas. Everyone is doing it in their own way, but all of them are happy.

Making of the Silhouette Christmas Village

I had great fun drawing all the silhouettes for our Christmas village paper templates!

There is a girl decorating a room with garlands and a boy preparing gingerbread dough in the house to the left. In the attic, they have a mouse who is decorating her tiny Christmas tree.

In the next house, a couple is dancing, while upstairs a little girl is shaking a present to guess what’s inside, while her sister is reading a book. The next house has a boy who is filling a stocking, a cat playing with a garland, and a grandma who is knitting a present for someone.

Oh, and there is one more house with a little gnome overlooking the village!

I imagined him to be like a little house spirit – a Scandinavian Tomte or a Slavic domovoy – who makes sure that everything is in order in the house.

How to Use the Christmas Village Paper Template

Now, despite how intricate the silhouettes look, the idea behind this craft is very simple.

You PRINT the window silhouettes on vellum paper, you DO NOT cut them.

You also don’t have to draw your own silhouettes… Though you may want to do that, and if you have children, they will likely want to try it. I will write about how this can be accomplished below.

Materials for Making the Silhouette Christmas Village

• printable paper Christmas village templates (try the free house template and make your own windows or get the full package of four houses with four pages of windows to make the whole village)
• black card stock
• printable vellum paper
• scissors
• (optional) hobby knife
• glue stick
• LED tea lights

How to Assemble the Christmas Village Paper Template

Watch the video in this post or follow the steps below.

1 – Print the Christmas village paper templates and cut them out. A hobby knife works well for cutting windows out. In the video, you can see that I recommend using black card stock for printing because it will give you an even finish on both sides and it will give you a little leeway when cutting the patterns. But if you only have white card stock, that will work as well.

2 – Print the window templates on printable vellum paper.

3 – Fold each Christmas village paper template to make it stand.

4 – Cut the windows out and glue them in, carefully matching the edges to the windows.

5 – Stand the houses up and arrange LED tea lights and/or LED strings behind the houses to illuminate the windows.

Caution: Do not use real candles next to paper decorations!

And this is how it looks in the dark.

How to Make Your Own Templates

You will need to get vellum paper and ink pens. Alternatives are possible. I tried drawing on vellum with sharpies and got mixed results: some pens/paper combine a lot better than others. It’s worth a go as well. Black acrylic paint should work as well if you are handy with a brush and willing to wait while the paint dries.

The idea is to find something that leaves black silhouettes but dries quickly enough that it would not smear on vellum paper, which is partially made of plastic.

Next, make outlines of windows and draw your designs. Or glue the vellum paper right to the windows and then make drawings.

You can use my designs of houses or make your own! My five-year-old son opted for making his own houses from scratch, drawing and cutting. Here is one of them.

Get the Templates!

You can get one free house template here. If you would like all four houses with window designs to put the village together, you can get them here.

The design for this project can also be found in our Silhouette Christmas Bundle. The book is a collection of various ideas for Christmas-themed silhouette crafts—ornaments, lanterns, cards, tags and toys. Altogether, there are fifteen silhouette crafts with over sixty pages of printable silhouette designs. Print and make—it’s that easy!

Play board games, dress paper dolls, read, and colour pages, while at the same time learning geography, history, and folklore, with the Christmas Around the World bundle.