Free Christmas fonts could help you out if you're on a tight budget and tighter deadline to deliver festive designs this holiday season. We're fortunate that font designers are no Scrooges, and many make free Xmas fonts available to download online for fellow designers.
The festive season could see you asked to produce greetings cards, seasonal flyers, marketing materials and a wide range of design assets, so we've aimed to pick out festive fonts in different styles, some with a traditional or vintage feel, some that are light and playful, and some that offer all-out quirkiness to inject some typographic cheer into proceedings.
The best free Christmas fonts
01. New Christmas Font
- Download New Christmas font from befonts.com
- 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
- Download Dear Santa from dafont.com
- 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. Beyond Wonderland
- Download Beyond Wonderland from 1001 Fonts
- 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
- 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. Santa's Sleigh
- Download Santa's Sleigh from Font Space
- 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.
06. Metro Retro NF
- Download Metro Retro NF from 1001 Fonts
- 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.
07. 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.
08. Christmas On Crack
- Download Christmas on Crack from 1001 Fonts
- 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.
09. HolLeigh Caps Font
- Download HolLeigh Caps Font from Font Space
- 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 like 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.
10. Christmas/Flakes Font
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.
11. Holly Nites
- Get Holly Nites from Font Space
- 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.
12. ChopinScript
- Download Chopin Script from 1001 Fonts
- 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.
13. Christmas Lights font
- Download Christmas Lights font from Dafont
- 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.
14. Badinerie Christmas font
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. It's available for non-commercial use; commercial use requires a licence.
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.
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