Christmas color palettes: hex codes for red, green and gold

Red and green have meant Christmas for well over a century, but the exact reds and greens matter more than people expect. A bright fire-engine red next to a lime green looks like a traffic light; a deep berry red with a dark fir green looks like a wreath. The palettes on this page are built around the second kind, with a gold or cream to give the eye somewhere to rest.

The five palettes

• Classic Christmas pairs holly berry red (#B3121F) with fir green (#1E5631), then adds ornament gold, a warm snow white and a mulled-wine dark red for text. It suits cards, gift tags and church bulletins.
• Nordic Christmas is quieter: spruce green, lingonberry red, wool white, birch-bark tan and a blue-gray winter dusk. It works for knitwear patterns, minimalist cards and Scandinavian-style table settings.
• Candy cane is the playful one, with candy red, white, peppermint pink and mint leaf green. Use it for children's party invitations or a cookie-swap flyer.
• Gold and evergreen drops red almost entirely and leans on deep evergreen with gilt and champagne. It reads as elegant and works for a formal dinner menu or a company holiday party.
• Frosted pastel is the modern option: frost, ice, gingerbread icing and eucalyptus with a single berry accent.

Keeping the text readable

Under each palette, ColorPlum lists the pairs that reach the WCAG 4.5:1 ratio for normal text. In the classic palette, mulled wine on snow measures 11.85:1 and fir green on snow 7.79:1, so either can carry a whole paragraph. Holly red on snow is 6.26:1, fine for headings. The frosted pastel palette has no pair that reaches 4.5:1, which is normal for pastels: use it for backgrounds and decoration, and set the words in a dark color such as charcoal.

Red and green together is also the pairing that people with the most common kinds of color-vision deficiency find hardest to tell apart. Don't rely on red versus green alone to carry meaning, such as "red means sold out", and keep a strong light-dark difference between them; the gold and cream in each palette help with that.

Worked example

You are making a family Christmas card with a photo, a greeting and a short letter on the back. Start from the classic palette. Put the greeting in holly berry red on the snow background at 40px or larger, set the letter in mulled wine (11.85:1 on snow), and use ornament gold (#D4A537) for a thin border and the year. Gold is too light for text on snow, so keep it decorative. If you want the card to feel more modern, press Variation: it shifts every color a little in hue and lightness but keeps the light-dark structure, so the readable pairs stay readable. Then press Download PNG to drop the palette into Canva or your photo app as a reference.

Printing Christmas colors

Bright reds and greens are hard for home printers. Deep, slightly muted versions like holly berry and fir print more faithfully than pure screen red (#FF0000) and green (#00FF00). If the card is going to a print shop, send the hex codes along with your file so the shop can match them to its inks.

Sources

1. W3C, Web Content Accessibility Guidelines (WCAG) 2.2: contrast minimum (checked 2026-11-10) w3.org
2. W3C, CSS Color Module Level 4: hex colors and color conversions (checked 2026-11-10) w3.org