Christmas Light Scavenger Hunt

This Christmas Light Scavenger Hunt is going to make a fun family tradition! Drive, bike, or walk around to look at Christmas lights and let your kids check off items from the scavenger hunt!

Do you have fun memories about Christmas lights from your childhood? My family would load up in the car and drive a distance from our home to a neighborhood so lit up it could be seen from an airplane. Each yard was full of Christmas lights and a page from a story book. It was magical!

How To Have A Christmas Light Scavenger Hunt

This free printable makes it easy to have a Christmas light scavenger hunt – print and go! I recommend some cocoa, tea, or cider in a thermos to take along to make it a little extra special.

I bet you could find all the pieces of this scavenger hunt in your neighborhood or one near you!

As a Southern Arizona family, the winters are pretty mild so we walk around as a family and look at lights almost every night. But there are also some amazing neighborhoods brimming with Christmas lights that we drive around to go visit too!

We like to search for the best house of the year. My husband is pretty obsessed with Christmas lights, so sometimes our house wins. 😉

To make the scavenger hunt engaging for all the kids in your family, we have included some of the holiday staples like a gingerbread man, Santa, snowman and snowflakes. We had a neighbor who hung up a flying pig every year before they moved… I am sad we don’t get to see that anymore! Thus, no flying pigs on the Christmas light scavenger hunt list, hah!

It’s fun to be the one to spot something from the list and it makes little kids feel confident and proud of themselves. Consider setting parameters about which family members are responsible for finding certain items, or if your family is really into competition, give everyone their own copy and make it a race!

More Fun Christmas Light Ideas

When the kids were younger, we would practice our counting skills by counting how many houses in our neighborhood had Christmas lights, starting the day after Thanksgiving. It is fun to see the number go up most nights as we get closer and closer to the big day!

Now they are all very proficient counters and while I’m sure we will still count Christmas lights, this printable is going to be a fun surprise for them too!

Another Christmas light idea is to rate the houses. Find your favorite one! Decide as a family which houses make up your top 5 and encourage your kids to articulate what makes a house their favorite.