🎅 Santa Claus emoji

The Santa Claus emoji 🎅, also popularly called Santa emoji or Father Christmas emoji, was approved under Unicode 6.0 in 2010 as Father Christmas. On most major platforms, the emoji depicts the head of Santa Claus as he is most often pictured: a jolly old man with a long beard and red fur hat with a white pom-pom. The Apple version oddly depicts Santa with a blonde beard. Santa’s shoulders are visible on the Google version. Santa’s eyes are closed in the Samsung and Facebook versions of the emoji, and the Samsung version uniquely depicts Santa happily laughing (likely with a “Ho, ho, ho!”) The Santa Claus emoji 🎅 depicts Santa with the same yellow skin as other people emoji, but can be customized with several different skin tones.

As an extremely famous symbol of the incredibly popular holiday of Christmas, Santa Claus is well known both on social media and everywhere else. For this reason, the Santa Claus emoji 🎅 can be used to refer to Santa and/or Christmas even if neither are specifically mentioned. The Santa Claus emoji 🎅 is often used alongside other Christmas-themed emoji such as the Christmas Tree emoji 🎄 and the Wrapped Present emoji 🎁.

While Santa Claus and Father Christmas are sometimes said to be different people, the Santa Claus emoji 🎅 is commonly used to refer to both of them.