🎅Santa Claus Emoji
Generally, the 🎅 emoji means Santa Claus. People use it to express holiday cheer, wishes for Christmas, or to show they're feeling festive.
The 🎅 emoji is Santa Claus.
- Unicode
- U+1F385
- Released
- 2010
- Shortcode
- :santa:
- Skin tones
- Yes
What does the 🎅 Santa Claus emoji mean?
People search for it under a lot of different names. All of these point at the same character.
People also look for it as father christmas emoji.
Santa Claus emoji on iPhone, Android, WhatsApp and X
Vendors keep repainting this one. Counting the archived versions further down, the santa claus has been drawn in 4 ways.
iPhone, iPad, macOS
Android, Gmail, Chrome
X, Discord, Twemoji apps
Facebook, Messenger
Open-source, design systems
Galaxy, One UI
Windows, Teams, Fluent
WhatsApp on Android
Slack, Discord themes
See the whole set the way each system draws it — iPhone emojis, Android emojis, WhatsApp emojis and Discord emojis.
Santa Claus emoji skin tones
🎅 supports all five Fitzpatrick skin tone modifiers. Each one is a separate character sequence — tap any to copy it.
Santa Claus emoji copy and paste
Everything here is the same character in different notation — including the shortcode chat apps know it by, :santa:.
In your code
Escapes for the languages people actually paste this into. Every one of them produces the same character, and that character is U+1F385.
How to type the 🎅 Santa Claus emoji
Every system hides the emoji key somewhere else. Here is where, plus the raw codes for U+1F385 when there is no key at all.
Santa Claus emoji PNG and SVG
Grab the santa claus as transparent PNG or SVG. Each system ships its own drawing, and the licence stays with the vendor, all 9 of them.
Apple
Google
Twitter / X
Santa Claus emoji combinations
Ready-made combos built around santa claus for bios, captions and comments. Tap to copy.
Want two emojis fused into one sticker instead of set side by side? Emoji Kitchen does that with 🎅, and there are more ready-made pairs in emoji combinations and aesthetic emoji combos.
What 🎅 means from a girl or a guy
Same emoji, different intent depending on who sent it and what came before.
What 🎅 means in other countries
The default face of Christmas cheer everywhere, but sending it assumes the recipient actually celebrates that holiday.
instantly understood there, warm and fully expected as a seasonal greeting
colleagues who don’t celebrate Christmas can read it as a default being quietly applied to them
heavily used for holiday sales regardless of the actual audience’s traditions or background
Before you send it: Perfect for Christmas-specific messages; for a genuinely mixed audience, a season-neutral greeting avoids the assumption.
What 🎅 means on TikTok, WhatsApp and Discord
The character is the same everywhere, but the artwork and the reading of it change from app to app.
🎅 vs 🤶 — what is the difference?
Two emojis that get mixed up constantly. They are different characters with different names.
Unicode name: Santa Claus
Code: U+1F385 · added 2010
Shortcode: :santa:
Generally, the 🎅 emoji means Santa Claus.
Unicode name: Mrs. Claus
Code: U+1F936 · added 2016
Shortcode: :mrs_claus:
Generally, it means you’re thinking about Mrs.
Where the 🎅 Santa Claus emoji came from
This one is older than Unicode emoji: Japanese carriers were drawing it on their handsets years before the standard existed, which it finally joined in 2010.
Same character every time — U+1F385 never changed. Only the drawing did, and only because each vendor redraws its own set. Someone on an older phone still sees the older picture.
Long before Unicode had emoji, Japanese carriers shipped their own picture sets.
🎅 existed there as
KDDI au EAF0, SoftBank E448.
Those codes are why it survived into the standard at all — Unicode had to keep Japanese messages readable.
Santa Claus was approved as U+1F385 and shipped in Emoji 0.6 (2010). Emoji 0.6 is the original 2010 batch that came over from the Japanese sets.
Every vendor keeps its own artwork, so 🎅 is redrawn by Apple, Google, Twitter / X, Facebook, OpenMoji, Samsung, Microsoft, WhatsApp, JoyPixels. The character you send never changes — only the picture does.