Use the best free Christmas fonts to add some festive cheer to your designs.
(Image credit: Andika Studio)
Free Christmas fonts can be a life saver if you're on a tight budget and need to some add festive sparkle and typographic cheer to seasonal designs. Happily, font designers are no Scrooges, and there's a range of free Christmas fonts available to download online, whether you're looking for something traditional, light and playful or some all-out festive quirkiness.
To help you in your search, we've rounded up the best free Christmas fonts online for decorating creative projects in December 2023. Add some Christmas presence (ho ho ho!) to your designs with these free festive fonts – but just be sure to check the terms for each one because some are free for personal use only while others are free for all uses. And as it's Christmas, do consider a gift for the designers when the option's available.
I love the simplicity of this font's name; it spells out exactly what it is with no messing around. Designed by Andika Studio and free for personal use, it's sweet, friendly and nostalgic and can serve as a handwritten display font for festive designs. For commercial use, visit scratchones.com.
02. Dear Santa
Dear Santa offers an adorable childlike Christmas font (Image credit: Miss Tina Fonts)
For an adorable letter to Santa feel, Dear Santa from Miss Tina Fonts offers a childlike lowercase handwriting style complete with a series of cute ornamental festive glyphs, including a snowman, reindeer and Santa himself. It's free for personal and non-profit use, or $5 for a commercial licence.
03. Advent Font Pairing
This font is not just for Christmas (Image credit: Sylvia Reid)
Perhaps not strictly just for Christmas, this font pairing from Sylvia Reid has a more elegant feel with a dose of Art Deco inspiration in the display font. The display is accompanied by a much more simple geometric sans serif, which Reid suggest can be paired to create the perfect duo for Christmas designs.
04. Beyond Wonderland
Chris Hanson's Beyond Wonderland font offers a Burtonesque take on Christmas
Font hobbyist Chris Hanson created this quirky, Gothic-style calligraphy font on a whim. Its dark, decorative flourishes will add a darkly estive dose of Tim Burton to your designs. Beyond Wonderland is free for both personal and commercial use, with donations to a koala hospital appreciated. Sadly it doesn't support accented vowels.
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05. One Starry Night
Brittney Murphy's One Starry Night is a fun Christmas font for personal projects
One Starry Night is a fun, festive font created by Brittney Murphy Designs. Free for personal and non-profit use, it's a swirly, handwritten font that's guaranteed to add some sparkle to your projects for a Christmas story feel. Commercial use will set you back a mere $5.
06. Mountains of Christmas
Mountains of Christmas is another playful free Christmas font (Image credit: Tart Workshop)
This handwriting font has a staggered look for a bouncy, carefree effect. It pairs subtle serifs with soft curves for a unique playful character to this typeface that could work well with illustrations of festive scenes.
07. Santa's Sleigh
The regular weight of Santa's Sleigh is one of three options
Add a vintage feel to your Christmas designs with HypoTypo's Santa's Sleigh. It comes in three weights: regular, bold and – our favourite – deluxe. This one is free for non-commercial use only.
Bored with traditional Christmas fonts? You don't need a font specifically designed with Christmas in mind to add a sense of season festiveness to your designs. Metro Retro, a dramatic sans serif published by Nick's Fonts can make a real impact. Used sparingly, it's perfect for festive headlines in large point sizes.
The free version is uppercase only, but the commercial version, Metro Retro Redux (which was inspired by Wadsworth A. Parker's 1927 typeface, Modernistic) comes with lowercase letters and a complete Adobe character set.
09. Rothenburg Decorative
Embellished swirls mark Dieter Steffmann's Gothic-style font, Rothenburg Decorative
For a more blackletter style of script, Dieter Steffmann's calligraphic font Rothenburg Decorative will add a splash of Gothic class to your projects. With 194 elaborate characters, it's free for commercial use – like all Steffmann's fonts. This could be a nice option for creating a feel of Christmas tradition from bygone days.
10. Christmas On Crack
There are 80 characters in Parallax's Christmas On Crack font
After something a little less heavy than Rothenburg Decorative? Despite the controversial-sounding name, Christmas On Crack also offers an old-time Gothic approach to Christmas, but it throws in a dash of fun too with a more modern cartoonish take on Gothic elements. Designed by David Lovelace, aka Parallax, it's available for Mac and PC. Commercial licences are available if you make a donation.
11. HolLeigh Caps Font
This free Christmas font offers delicate thin letters with a festive flourish (Image credit: Dani Foster Herring)
Christmas trees? Christmas Lights? There's a wide range of fun Christmas fonts that apple Christmas imagery directly to the lettering. We particularly Dani Foster Herring's HolLeigh Caps Font for something a bit different. It's an elegant, thin and delicate all caps font with holly embellishments, and it could work nicely or short headings. It's free for non-commercial use.
12. Christmas/Flakes Font
Christmas/Flakes comes in two versions, one more elaborate than the other
Perhaps no entry in our list of the best free Christmas fonts says 'Christmas' quite so well as Florida-based creative Randy Ford's ornamental typeface Christmas/Flakes – at least if you're in the northern hemisphere that is. Best used as a headline font, this snowflake-adorned option is free for commercial use and suitable for both Mac and PC.
13. Candy Cane
Decorate your designs with Michel Bujardet's minty fresh Candy Cane font
Sweet-toothed? Matching Christmas/Flakes in the festive stakes, Michel Bujardet's Candy Cane is a decorative font heavily inspired by a favourite festive treat, with every letter designed to look like candy cane. It's free for personal use, and comes complete with upper and lowercase lettering, numerals and punctuation.
14. Sentinel
Sentinel is the second free Christmas font designed by Dieter Steffmann
A less specifically Christmas font, this is another entry from Dieter Steffmann – who also goes by the name Typographer Mediengestaltung. Sentinel is a striking uppercase display font with 52 ornamental characters. Again, it's free for non-commercial use and perfect for Christmas designs that need an injection of classic festive tradition from the past.
15. Holly Nites
Add an illustrative edge to festive designs with Holly Nites
Jester Font Studio's charming Holly Nites Font is a blocky, 3D font decorated with a holly leaf pattern. Perfect for Christmas cards, it's free for personal and non-commercial use.
16. ChopinScript
Dieter Steffmann also designed ChopinScript, a free-flowing cursive font
One final free cursive font for luck! ChopinScript is based on Phil Martin's Polonaise, and was originally released as a True Type font in 1999. The new OpenType font has been embellished with ornaments and accented characters, offering a lovely option for festive messages. It's free for both commercial and non-commercial use.
17. The Gingerbread House
The Gingerbread House font is perfect for a festive fairy tale or ghost story
Our second entry from one-time type designer Chris Hanson, The Gingerbread House is a gloriously creepy decorative serif. Like Beyond Wonderland at number 3 in our list, this one also has an air of Burton to it, going for a gothic fairytale take on Christmas. Be warned: there's no number '4' for some reason. That aside, it's a font full of Christmas character. It's free for commercial use, donations to Hanson's chosen charity are very welcome.
Everyone loves some shiny Christmas lights, and this free font from Sunkissed Minimalist Co does a good job of recreating the effect. Christmas Lights is a hand-drawn holiday font with each letter encased in a traditional Christmas light; we'd recommend putting your text along a gently curved path for extra impact and setting each letter in a different colour, while for the ultimate in realism, you should set at least one in black, because there's always at least one broken light
The free download is only an impartial set for personal use. Commercial licences are available for the full font.
19. Christmas font
This Christmas font gets straight to the point (Image credit: Jacky Hernandes)
There's no messing about with clever poetic names here; Christmas is a lively script font featuring uppercase letters supplemented with bauble-like ornamentation. Created by Jacky Hernandes, it's perfect for those last-minute cards and invitations. Like several of these Christmas fonts, it's free for personal use only.
20. Badinerie Christmas font
Badinerie Christmas is packed with festive ornamentation (Image credit: Jean Boyault)
The standard version of Badinerie by Jean Boyault is an elegant cursive font that would look perfect on a Christmas card.. but hold on just a second, because there's also a special Christmas version that looks even more festive.
While Badinerie has optional flower ornamentations to brighten up your work, Badinerie Christmas features all manner of festive decorations to give your designs that extra-Christmassy feel.
Finally, capture the spirit of old Saint Nick and Christmas of the past with Santa Claus. This gorgeously medieval-inspired font family that looks like it was hand-drawn using wide-nibbed calligraphy pens.
As well as a regular font containing upper and lowercase letters, punctuation and decorative special characters, there's also a deco set full of lovely snowflake dingbats that you'll want to use to give your designs that final festive flourish. Again, it's free for personal use only.
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Joe is a regular freelance journalist and editor at Creative Bloq. He writes news, features and buying guides and keeps track of the best equipment and software for creatives, from video editing programs to monitors and accessories. A veteran news writer and photographer, he now works as a project manager at the London and Buenos Aires-based design, production and branding agency Hermana Creatives. There he manages a team of designers, photographers and video editors who specialise in producing visual content and design assets for the hospitality sector. He also dances Argentine tango.
