Looking to add a bit of festive, typographic cheer to your Christmas cards and seasonal designs? Then look no further: I’ve searched high and low to bring you the best free Christmas fonts to spruce up your creative projects this December.

Add some Christmas presence (pun intended) to your designs with these 13 free festive fonts. ‘Tis the season for giving, after all…

01. Beyond Wonderland

Font hobbyist Chris Hanson kicks off our best free Christmas fonts list with his quirky, Gothic-style calligraphy font, Beyond Wonderland. Created on a whim, the font is free for both personal and, says the author, commercial use – just make sure you credit Hanson.

Sadly it doesn’t support accented vowels, but its dark, decorative flourishes will add more than a touch of Burton to your designs.

FORMAT: TTF

02. One Starry Night

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 Christmas projects. Commercial use will set you back a mere $5.

FORMAT: TTF

03. Santa’s Sleigh

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.

FORMAT: TTF

04. Metro Retro NF

Tired of traditional Christmas fonts? Make an impact with Metro Retro, a dramatic sans serif published by Nick’s Fonts. 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.

FORMAT: TTF and OTF

05. 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.

FORMAT: TTF

06. Christmas On Crack

After something a little less heavy than Rothenburg Decorative? Christmas On Crack by David Lovelace, aka Parallax, has a similar Gothic twist but with a dash of fun thrown in. It’s available for Mac and PC.

07. Christmas/Flakes Font

No entry into our top 13 free Christmas fonts list, so far, says ‘Christmas’ quite so well as Florida-based creative Randy Ford‘s ornamental typeface Christmas/Flakes. Best used as a headline font, it’s free for commercial use and suitable for both Mac and PC.

08. Channel

Designed by Swedish designer Måns Grebäck and published through the Aring Typeface foundry, Channel is a classy, cursive script with a handwritten feel. The full, 367-glyph font and commercial licence is $589, but you can use the free demo version for personal projects.

FORMAT: TTF

09. Candy Cane

Matching Christmas/Flakes in the festive stakes, Michel Bujardet’s Candy Cane is a decorative font dripping in Christmas spirit. It’s free for personal use, and comes complete with upper and lowercase lettering, numerals and punctuation.

10. Sentinel

Another entry from Dieter Steffmann – who also goes by the name Typographer Mediengestaltung – is Sentinel, a striking uppercase display font with 52 ornamental characters. Again, it’s free for non-commercial use and perfect for those Christmas designs.

11. 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.

12. ChopinScript

One more free cursive font for luck: ChopinScript. Based on Phil Martin’s Polonaise, this face was originally released as a True Type font in 1999. The new OpenType font has been embellished with ornaments and accented characters, and it’s free for both commercial and non-commercial use.

FORMAT: TTF and OTF

13. The Gingerbread House

The second entry from one-time type designer Chris Hanson is The Gingerbread House, a gloriously creepy decorative serif, again with an air of Burton to it. Be warned: there isn’t a ‘4’ – which, we’ll admit, isn’t especially helpful for any ‘Seasons Greetings 2014’-style messages… But that aside, it’s a font with Christmas character.