Santa’s Handwriting: What a Real Letter From Santa Looks Like Up Close

Your kid has seen your handwriting on a few hundred lunchbox notes, permission slips and birthday cards. That is the whole problem with writing Santa’s letter yourself, and it is the reason this page exists.

We write letters from Santa by hand, so here is what Santa’s handwriting actually looks like, up close and under a magnifying glass. Then the honest truth about Santa fonts, and how to write like Santa if you are doing it yourself this year.

What Santa’s handwriting actually looks like

Not calligraphy. That surprises people. The Santa in the movies writes with a quill, in copperplate that would take an hour a line. The Santa who writes to a real child writes like someone with a lot of letters to get through who means every one of them: a quick, warm hand in red ink, a little slanted, a lot of loops.

Here is what you see on a real one, photographed as it left our desk:

• Red ink that sits in the paper. Pen ink soaks in a little and pools where the pen lands. Put the first letter of any word under a magnifying glass and you can see where the stroke began.
• No two letters alike. Every “e” on the page is a slightly different “e”. A font has exactly one “e” and uses it four hundred times.
• Lines that wander. A line drifts a hair uphill or downhill across the page, because a hand resting on a desk wrote it. A printer places it.
• The child’s name, in the same hand as everything else. Same pen, same ink, same slant as the rest of the letter, not dropped into a blank. The name is the first thing a kid reads and the first thing a suspicious kid checks.

Santa’s signature

The signature is the part kids look at twice, so it gets its own section.

On our letters it is simply “Santa Claus”, signed by hand in red ink at the bottom of every handwritten letter, right above the line that says it was checked twice and signed. A big S, a big C, written fast, the way anyone signs a name they sign all day long.

If you are signing a note or a gift tag from Santa yourself, three rules:

1. Sign big. Santa does not have a timid signature.
2. Sign fast. A slow signature looks traced, and a kid who inspects things can tell a traced line from a written one.
3. Sign it the same way every year. The kid who kept last year’s letter will put the two side by side. That is how most Santas get caught, not on Christmas Eve but in a bedroom drawer in March.

How to tell real handwriting from a font

There are plenty of “Santa handwriting fonts” out there, and some of them are genuinely pretty. Here is the problem with every one of them, shown with two of our own letters: the handwritten one, and the free printed one we also send (it is printed, and we say so).

The five tells, in roughly the order a suspicious eight-year-old finds them:

1. The same letter twice. Find two lowercase “a”s. If they are identical down to the pixel, it is a font.
2. The perfectly straight line. Printers do not drift. Hands do.
3. The ink. Printer ink lies flat and even on top of the paper. Pen ink sinks in and gets darker where the pen pressed harder.
4. The dots and crosses. Real i-dots and t-crosses land in slightly different places every time. A font stamps them in the same spot.
5. The light. Tilt the page toward a lamp. A pen often leaves a faint groove in the paper. A printer never does.

None of that makes a printed letter bad. For a three-year-old, the red envelope with their name on it is the whole event, and our free printed letter exists for exactly that kid. But once a child starts checking, a font is the first thing that gives the game away.

How to disguise your handwriting for Santa (so they don’t catch you)

Plenty of parents do it, and it can be lovely. The trick is to stop it looking like you.

• Borrow a hand. The single best move: ask another adult to write it. A grandparent, a friend, a neighbor your kid has never watched write a shopping list. Your child knows your handwriting better than you do.
• If it has to be you, change the hand, not just the words. Write bigger than you normally do, slant the other way, and change how you make your “a” and your “g”, the two letters most people form in a way their family would recognize. Some parents use their other hand. It is slow and a bit shaky, which honestly suits a very old man.
• Use a pen that does not live in your kitchen drawer. Red ink, or a fountain pen. The blue ballpoint that signs the permission slips is evidence.
• Write it on scrap paper first. Santa does not cross things out.
• Put in one thing only Santa would know. Their best friend’s name, the kind thing they did in October that nobody mentioned. That detail convinces more than any handwriting ever will.
• Send it through the mail. A letter that arrives in the mailbox, with a stamp and their name on the envelope, beats one that appears on the pillow. If you want a real North Pole postmark on a letter you wrote yourself, the Postal Service runs a program for exactly that. We explain how it works in our guide to every way to get your kid a letter from Santa.

Gift tags are where most parents get caught. Pick ONE Santa style and never break it – all caps, a gold or red marker, a slant you never use – and write every tag in one sitting so they match. Better still, hand the pen to grandpa, a coworker, anyone whose writing your kid has never seen. Kids who crack the case crack it by comparing, so give them nothing to compare to.

Or let Santa’s desk write it

If your handwriting is known in your house (it is), this is what we do. Every handwritten letter from Santa is written by hand by our team of writers, a lot of them stay-at-home moms and retired teachers, in real pen and red ink on cream parchment. It carries your child’s name, their best friend’s name, what they are hoping for, and something they did this year worth noticing.

• The handwritten letter: $39.99, shipping included. Hand-addressed red envelope, North Pole return address, a real stamp, Santa’s embossed seal on the back flap and his North Pole stamp pressed on the letter. Order by December 12 and it arrives before Christmas, or you get a full refund (US addresses).
• The free printed letter: printed, and honest about it, in the same hand-addressed red envelope. Free letter. $6.99 shipping. Start with the free letter.
• Santa’s Nice List Certificate: your child’s full name and Santa’s signature, both written by hand, in the same envelope for $4.99.

And if the handwriting question arrives with a bigger one attached, here is what to say when your kid asks if Santa is real, word for word by age.

How do I stop my kid recognizing my handwriting on Santa’s letter?

Change the hand, not just the words: a different slant, different a’s and g’s, a pen that never lives in your kitchen drawer, or another adult’s hand altogether (the full list is above). Or skip the risk: our handwritten letter from Santa is written by one of our writers, in a hand your child has never seen.

Your handwriting is precious. It is just not Santa’s.