The two weeks before winter break are the hardest stretch of the school year to run. Attention is gone, the schedule is broken by concerts and assemblies, and half the class is counting days. A word search is not a lesson, and in that particular stretch it does not need to be.
The list is deliberately secular
Every word on every grid size here is from the cultural side of the holiday:
SANTA, REINDEER, SLEIGH, SNOWMAN, COOKIES, WRAPPING, MISTLETOE,
CAROL, TINSEL, GARLAND.
The list is the cultural half of the holiday almost throughout, with ANGEL as
the single exception. For a sheet built entirely around the religious vocabulary,
or entirely without it, the craft page takes a pasted list.
Three ways it actually gets used
The party. Print the 8x8 or 10x10, four to a page, and leave a stack on a table with pencils. It solves the awkward twenty minutes between the first arrivals and the actual start, which is the real problem at any class party.
The morning work. In the week before break, a fresh sheet on each desk buys you the first ten minutes of the day to take attendance and deal with the six things that have gone wrong before 8:15. Regenerate the layout between days so it is a different puzzle each morning with the same vocabulary.
The car and the kitchen table. Outside school this is a travel activity. The 14x14 with the answer key withheld will occupy a nine-year-old for a real stretch of highway.
The spelling angle, if you want one
Christmas vocabulary is unusually full of words children hear constantly and
almost never write: SLEIGH, WREATH, MISTLETOE, GINGERBREAD. The gap
between recognizing and spelling these is wide.
Read the twelve words aloud and have students write them before they see the
grid. Then hand out the puzzle. They hunt for words they have already attempted
once, which turns a passive activity into a self-correcting one: a child who
wrote sley will find SLEIGH on the grid and see the difference themselves.
Print early, for a boring reason
If you are building a party plan, run your copies in the first week of December rather than the last. The last week before break is when every teacher in the building has the same idea, the line at the copier is longest, and the toner runs out on somebody. Better it is not you.