Free Christmas fonts can add a whole lot of festive sparkle and typographic cheer to your seasonal designs. Font designers are no Scrooges, so free Christmas fonts abound offering lots of options for your designs, whether you're looking for something traditional, light and playful or some all-out festive quirkiness.
To help you narrow down your search, we've rounded up the best free Christmas fonts offered online for decorating your creative projects this December. Go ahead and add some Christmas presence (ho ho ho!) to your designs with these free festive fonts – just be sure you check the terms of use for each one, since some are free for personal use only, while others are free for all uses. And it is Christmas, so 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, make sure you read our infographic on what NOT to get a graphic designer for Christmas!
The best free Christmas fonts
01. Dear Santa
- Download Dear Santa from dafont.com (opens in new tab)
- 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.
02. Christmas
- Download Christmas from Behance (opens in new tab)
- Format: TTF and OTF
This Christmas font, simply named Christmas, can lend a more grown-up handwriting feel to your projects. It has multilingual support and the characters join up beautifully. Christmas is free for personal use or you can buy a commercial licence.
03. Beyond Wonderland
- Download Beyond Wonderland from 1001 Fonts (opens in new tab)
- 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.
04. One Starry Night
- Download One Starry Night from Font Space (opens in new tab)
- 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.
05. Mountains of Christmas
- Download Mountains of Christmas from Font Squirrel (opens in new tab)
- 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.
06. Santa's Sleigh
- Download Santa's Sleigh from Font Space (opens in new tab)
- 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.
07. Metro Retro NF
- Download Metro Retro NF from 1001 Fonts (opens in new tab)
- 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 (opens in new tab) (which was inspired by Wadsworth A. Parker's 1927 typeface, Modernistic) comes with lowercase letters and a complete Adobe character set.
08. Rothenburg Decorative
- Download Rothenburg Decorative from 1001 Fonts (opens in new tab)
- 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.
09. Christmas On Crack
- Download Christmas on Crack from 1001 Fonts (opens in new tab)
- Format: TTF
After something a little less heavy than Rothenburg Decorative? Despite the attention-grabbing 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.
10. HolLeigh Caps Font
- Download HolLeigh Caps Font from Font Space (opens in new tab)
- 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.
11. Christmas/Flakes Font
- Download Christmas/Flakes Font from Font River (opens in new tab)
- 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.
12. Candy Cane
- Download Candy Cane from dafont.com (opens in new tab)
- 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.
13. Sentinel
- Download Sentinel from 1000 Fonts (opens in new tab)
- 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.
14. Holly Nites
- Get Holly Nites from Font Space (opens in new tab)
- 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.
15. ChopinScript
- Download Chopin Script from 1001 Fonts (opens in new tab)
- 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.
16. The Gingerbread House
- Download The Gingerbread House from 1001 Fonts (opens in new tab)
- 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
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