21 of the best free Christmas fonts
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.
For more font inspiration, see our best free fonts and best free handwriting fonts roundups – you might also find something that works for Christmas there. And if you're choosing Christmas presents, see our guide to festive gift ideas for creatives in 2023.
The best free Christmas fonts
01. New Christmas Font
Format: OTF
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
Format: TTF
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
Format: TTF and OTF
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
Format: TTF
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.
05. One Starry Night
Format: TTF
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
Format: TTF
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
Format: TTF
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.
08. Metro Retro NF
Format: TTF and OTF
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
Format: TTF
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
Format: TTF
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
Format: TTF
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
Format: TTF
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
Format: TTF
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
Format: TTF
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
Format: TTF
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
Format: TTF and OTF
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
Format: TTF
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.
For more festive inspiration, see our pick of the best Christmas ads of all time. And for examples of what to avoid, see our piece on the worst Christmas decoration designs, which include a couple of typographic crimes.
18. Christmas Lights font
Format: TTF
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
Format: TTF
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
Format: OTF
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.
21. Santa Claus font
Format: TTF
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.