Every Christmas Emoji

Jeremy Burge

Dec 23, 2020 • 2 min read

There's a lot.

Depending on exactly how broad you consider a Christmas emoji list to be, this is what we've come up with as of December 2020:

Looking at the list, a few are a bit tenuous. 🧝 Elf isn't necessarily in the style that you might find helping Santa, but is included to be comprehensive.

🛐 Place of Worship is an emoji designed to symbolize any location designated for prayer or religious activity.

🔔 Bell was originally intended for notifications or alerts, and paired with 🔕 Bell with Slash to silence alerts. Out of context, it works just as easily as a church bell. The ambiguity of the emoji keyboard can be a strength.

☃️ Snowman and ⛄ Snowman Without Snow are both very similar, but had different origins. The former has existed as a black and white Unicode character since 1993, while the latter was derived from Japanese emoji characters dating back to 1997.

Christmas - as with many holidays - is often considered a time for family. This list includes one 👪 Family emoji, broadly intended to cover the concept of a family unit.

Of course everyone's family doesn't look the same, and there are 25 other family emojis available where the gender of each family member is specified:

A common request is for family emojis which support realistic skin tones instead of the default yellow.

Above: Over 7,000 emojis would be required if each family member could have their own skin tone. Due to this, most platforms only allow yellow instead of this. Image: Emojipedia mockup using Apple images.

Skin tones for family emojis are supported on some platforms, but hasn't been recommended by Unicode due to the 7,000+ combinations required if each family member could have their own skin tone.

Popular requests that aren't on this list are a candy cane emoji, holly, or perhaps coal.

Having said that, Christmas is one event that has more emojis specific to it than many other celebrations, especially with the recent addition of a person in a Christmas hat to accompany 🎅 Santa Claus and 🤶 Mrs. Claus.

View the full Christmas Emoji List - updated each year, if and when any new emojis fit the theme.