Ravensburger - Herd It's Nearly Christmas 1000 Piece Jigsaw Puzzle

Nine farm animals in Christmas hats, crowded into the frame like a family photo where nobody is quite ready. Painted in loose ink and watercolour with the linework left showing, which is a long way from the usual glossy Christmas artwork and much the better for it.

What you are looking at

A hillside at night under a huge gold star. Across the back, two heavy horses, a chestnut shire in profile and a black and white one wearing a Santa hat. A white goose standing on the chestnut's back wearing a paper crown. In the middle, a cow with a red clown nose, a donkey in a green and red jester hat, and a border collie with cardboard antlers strapped on and an expression that says it did not agree to this.

Along the bottom, a curly-horned ram, a hen in a gold crown, a pig, a second collie in a Santa hat, a goat in a striped elf hat and another hen. A robin flying in at the top right with holly in its beak, a gold halo propped up on nothing in the middle, and a small lit farmhouse in the distance on the right.

What it is like to build

The style is the difficulty. Loose watercolour means soft, bleeding edges and large areas of the same wash, and the ink outlines are deliberately broken rather than continuous. So the usual method of hunting for a hard boundary works less often than you expect.

Go for the hats. Every piece of red, green or gold in this picture belongs to a hat, a crown, a nose or the star, and those are the only saturated colours in an image that is otherwise brown, cream, grey and midnight blue. Place them all first and you have pinned every animal's head. Then work outward into the bodies. The night sky is the last job, deep blue with scattered small stars and paint spatter, and it goes in by shape.

Why the Ravensburger cut matters here

Made in Germany since 1891, and on soft-edged watercolour the fit is doing more work than usual because colour alone will let you talk yourself into a wrong placement. No two pieces in a 1000 piece share a shape, so if it seats cleanly it is right. Thick board with a linen-textured low-glare finish, which suits paper-and-ink artwork particularly well.

Specifications

A little context

Most Christmas artwork is glossy and literal. Loose hand-drawn work is a small and growing corner of the category, and it appeals to a buyer who would not otherwise own a Christmas puzzle at all, which is exactly why it is worth stocking alongside the traditional ones rather than instead of them. Derived from multiple public data sources across retail, search and community platforms, refreshed 31 August 2026.

Stock is real and it is in Sydney. Free shipping Australia wide over $150, and free same-day delivery inside 6 km of North Bondi with no minimum.

Built it already? Use the Questions section below and tell us how you found it. Which part fought you, how long it took, and whether you would send someone else to it. We answer every one.