Four Free Christmas Fonts

One of the most common desktop publishing projects during the holiday season is the Christmas card. Families create cards to send out to friends and relatives. Businesses create cards to send out to clients and vendors. In both cases, it's important to create an elegant design. You may already have an image in mind for the card, but some cards come down to using the right font to say 'Merry Christmas' or 'Happy Holidays' across the front. That makes it important to choose the font that creates the right feeling for your holiday message — whether it's solemn, fun, or festive.

Depending on the design of your project, you may find that you need a second font to pair with your festive Christmas font. A simple text font can be used for signing the card or writing a message inside it. Choosing that font is a matter of finding a clean font that is easy to read, but is somewhat similar to the Christmas font you've chosen. If you choose a decorative serif font, for instance, you'll usually find that a serif text font will most closely match it.

Many Christmas cards use calligraphy fonts to send holiday greeting. The Christmas Card font is such a calligraphy font — your cards can look like you spent hours on beautiful lettering and all you need to do is download this font and set your text in it. Christmas Card is especially evocative of old-fashioned, Old World Christmases. The numerals included in this font are Roman. They are elegant, but if your text includes a lot of numbers, Christmas Card may not be the best choice, although the font's creator did include XI and XII as symbols. The punctuation is also very limited in this font.

What's Christmas without a few lights? This font actually comes in two versions: Christmas Lights Indoor, where the bulbs containing the letters hang straight down, and Christmas Lights Outdoors, where the bulbs hang at angles. Either version of Christmas Lights makes a great title font, although it can be difficult to read in small sizes. This font comes with a text file that should be read if you plan to use it: there are some tricks to getting the best possible appearance with Christmas Lights because of the connections between lights. While the creator included a fairly limited set of accented letters, he did include a surprising number of symbols.

If you're in the mood to add a few snowflakes to your text, Kingthings Christmas is right for you. Not only do snowflakes accentuate the letters in this font, they have the appearance of sitting in snow drifts. This font is ideal for titles and greetings; it has numbers and some symbols included. Kingthings Christmas is also an ideal winter font in general.

Your letters can be candy-cane stripped with the Candy Cane font. While this font isn't ideal for setting large blocks of text — the stripes make it difficult to read — it can be a great accent for shorter text. It can be paired with a number of cartoon fonts, as well, for fun effects.

If you need a few more Christmas fonts for your holiday projects, consider browsing through Dafont's database of Christmas fonts, which has over 80 fonts available with a Christmas theme.