When I first saw red paper chains strung up in my friend’s Brooklyn apartment last year, I thought: Cute! What a fun throwback to Christmases of yore, and a way to make the place ten times cozier as we gather to drink wine, gossip, and be merry.
At the time, that was the extent of my thoughts on paper chains. Now, fast forward to 2025, and I can’t seem to escape them. They’re in shop windows, on trees at the local holiday market, and all over my Instagram. Call it holiday-induced craftmania, or kindergarten chic. Paper chains—the classic kind, made by looping strips of colorful construction paper together—are having a moment.
Since Thanksgiving, a seemingly endless stream of TikTok videos explaining how to make paper garlands has taken over my feed—tutorials suggesting the specific papers, materials, and techniques to get the chunkiest chains or the most durable links. They experiment with velvet, felt, and ribbon, and offer advice on how to hang your decorations to create the most whimsical effect.
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Paper chains certainly aren’t new—they’re believed to date back to at least the 1800s, when they were first noted as a popular schoolchildren’s activity—but their online resurgence has brought them to a new audience eager to get their craft on. (And post about it.) Retailers seem to have noticed, too: A number of stores, including Toast, Anthropologie, East End Press, and Cambridge Imprint, sell paper chain kits, some of which have sold out online. On Pinterest, searches for “paper chains” have spiked amid the holiday season.
So, what’s behind this paper chain revival? For many, it’s about a return to childlike wonder.
Some call the trend a “recession indicator” (isn’t everything these days?); others call it “Little Women Christmas” (à la the Greta Gerwig version), or the kitschy polar opposite of “Ralph Lauren Christmas.”
It may also be, as others have noted, a response to the “sad beige” trend of minimalist, neutral interiors. Just last week, Pantone announced their color of the year is literally white (or rather, “Cloud Dancer,” as they call it), and there’s already been pushback from those who prefer colorful chaos, texture, and nostalgia over a manicured, catalogue-ready look.
Sean A. Pritchard, the award-winning English garden designer, is a fully paid-up fan of paper chains as Christmas decor—just take his holiday tablescapes in a recent Vogue story as an example. For Pritchard, paper chains are synonymous with the magic of Christmastime as a child, a feeling many of us strive to recreate as adults. Plus, he explains, paper chains are a sure sign that you’re having fun and “surrendering to the chaos” of the holidays.
“There can be a bit of snobbishness around Christmas,” Pritchard adds. “This idea that we can have Christmas, but we should also have a tasteful Christmas. I’m just not interested in that at all. Thinking about being a child at Christmas, you weren’t concerned about whether everything color-matched and whether everything was really elegant and whatnot. It was kind of just a free-for-all of color, shape, pattern, noise, lights.”
Pritchard says that the paper chain trend might also be attributed to a rising interest in slowing down one’s pace of living, noting that there are “mental health benefits” to crafting. “When you’re making a paper chain, it’s quite therapeutic,” he says. (Not everyone on TikTok agrees—for every few wholesome videos about the comfort of crafting, there’s a jokey, slightly unhinged one about how the quest to make paper chains brought some people to the edge of their sanity, one paper cut away from a full breakdown).
Still, paper chains carry an enduring timelessness and charm for Pritchard. “I think it just transcends being a trend, for me. I think it will be something that is always a part of somebody’s Christmas,” he says.
Delaney Lundquist, a Charlotte, North Carolina-based design manager and interior design content creator known as Tremont Home, has made several videos about the paper chain craze, and loves the fact that it’s an activity you can share with friends and family. Lundquist recommends inviting people over to make paper chains together, and using scraps from around the house or from a local creative reuse center to be more creative and sustainable with your crafting. In this way, your decor becomes part of the festivities.
“I think the appeal of the paper chain is its simplicity,” says Lisa Przystup, a writer based in Delhi, New York, who has been decorating for the holidays with paper chains for years. “I really love that it kind of takes the whole ‘throw money at it’ aspect of decorating for the holidays and turns it on its head,” she adds. For Przystup, making paper chains also “taps into that childlike joy of play, which I think is so freeing and sets it apart from more ambitious crafts.”
So as we settle in for the holidays, why not give it a try yourself? As you sip hot chocolate by the roaring fireplace (or, if you’re like me, by a crackling YouTube yule log), you might find a new way to revel in the festive spirit—and to make your inner kindergartener proud.