What to Write in an Easter Card When There Are Two Easters

First decision: which Sunday are you writing for

In 2027, Western Easter falls on Sunday, March 28, and Orthodox Easter, called Pascha, falls on Sunday, May 2. Five weeks apart is the widest gap the two calendars can produce. Some years they share a Sunday, and they will again on April 16, 2028, but 2027 is not one of those years, so a single card run in March will be wrong for somebody on your list. Split the list before you write a word: who keeps the early date, who keeps the later one. A card for a Pascha household that lands in March is not charmingly early. It is a card for a feast that family is still seven weeks of fasting away from, and it reads the way a Christmas card reads in the first week of November.

There is one honourable exception, and it is a card that names the gap. If you want to write in March to someone whose Easter is in May, say so inside the card: yours is in May, I know, this is a placeholder. The short lines further down include one written for exactly that job. What you cannot do is wish them a happy Easter in March and hope they will not notice. They will notice. Their whole Lent is still in front of them.

Timing for the March list: post to land by Thursday, March 25 at the latest. Good Friday, March 26, is a public holiday in much of the world, post slows down, and a card that arrives on the Tuesday after Easter reads as an apology with a bunny on it. For the May list, the last week of April is plenty early, and a card landing in the first days of May is still in season, because the Pascha weekend runs long and the greeting is exchanged all week. One 2027 quirk worth knowing: in Britain the clocks go forward in the small hours of Easter Sunday itself, so the March card lands on the first long evening of the year, which is a nice thing to mention to anyone who has been counting the dark weeks. The wider holiday cluster, with the general-purpose lines, sits in holiday card messages; this page is about the two decisions the general lines cannot make for you.

Second decision: how much faith goes in

Think of the greeting as a ladder with four rungs. 'Happy Easter' is the ground floor and is safe in every house. 'Blessed Easter' is one rung up: still warm, still deniable, but it assumes a reader who hears 'blessed' as a good word rather than a church word. 'He is risen' is a statement of faith, not a greeting, and it comes with a set reply, 'He is risen indeed'. 'Christos Anesti' is the Pascha greeting, Greek for 'Christ is risen', and its reply is 'Alithos Anesti', 'truly He is risen'. The rule for the whole ladder: write to the reader's rung, not yours. Your faith is not the setting. Theirs is.

Here is the mistake in its natural habitat. A first draft for a brother-in-law, written with love and no calibration: 'Wishing you a blessed Easter and all the joy of the risen Lord this spring!' He left the church at nineteen and now changes the subject at christenings. The greeting is two rungs above his head, so the whole card lands as a sermon he did not order. The fix drops the greeting to his rung, keeps the warmth, and spends it on his actual spring instead:

Happy Easter. Hope the new house gives you a proper spring, and that this move is the last one for a while. The garden here is finally behaving. Come and inspect it before the fence goes up.

Mixed-faith households get one card, not two. Address the greeting to the household at the lower rung, and let the warmer material live in a sentence in the middle, where it reads as yours rather than as the card's official position. And when the ladder overshoots, it usually overshoots in one of these four shapes:

'He is risen! Can't wait to catch up on all your news over a huge Easter lunch!' Sent to a friend widowed in February. The greeting is fine. The huge lunch is the problem.

'Some-bunny is going to love their basket this year!' In the March office card, for a manager whose Easter is in May. Wrong twice in eleven words.

'Wishing you and your family a blessed and holy Easter, from the whole department.' To a client whose beliefs nobody in the department has ever asked about.

'Here's to new beginnings and fresh starts!' To a sister in April, three weeks after her miscarriage. New beginnings is Easter's favourite phrase, and sometimes its cruellest.

I learned the ladder at a mantel in Bath. My piano teacher, Celia, who taught me from when I was nine until I was sixteen, keeps every Easter card she is sent on her mantel until Pentecost, in the order they arrived. In 2022 I sent her a card whose whole joke was that I had given up chocolate for Lent and the egg had lasted until the Thursday. When I visited on Easter Monday it was face-down at the back of the row. She never said a word about it, which was worse. Since then she gets one true line, usually about her forsythia, which is out before anyone else's on her street and has been for thirty years. Cards that get displayed get read by the whole room, all spring. Write for the mantel, not the moment.

Faith-forward lines, for readers who would want them

These assume a faith you share with the reader, and the test is simple: would they say the reply out loud? If a line below would make your reader feel witnessed, use it whole. If it would make them feel preached at by their own post, drop two rungs and go back to the warm middle.

• He is risen. Thinking of you at the sunrise service, and at the table after it, both.
• Blessed Easter. May the empty tomb do its quiet work in your year.
• For the one who sang in the choir right through Lent: rest your voice today. He is risen indeed.
• Wishing you the joy of Easter morning, the real kind, the kind that comes after a long Friday.
• Easter blessings to the woman whose prayers have carried this family through two hard winters running.
• To our pastor and his wife: thank you for Holy Week, every service and every visit. Rest now.
• Rejoicing with you this Easter. The stone is rolled away, and so, at last, is the long winter.
• Welcome to the newest member of the church, baptised on Easter morning. What a day to begin.

The warm middle, where most of the list lives

Most cards on most lists belong here: the greeting at the ground-floor rung, and the warmth carried by one specific true thing instead of by adjectives. If you know what their Easter actually looks like, the line is already half written.

• Happy Easter. Spring has been slow this year, but lunch at yours never has been.
• Wishing you a long lunch, a walk after it, and the good chocolate, not the waxy kind.
• Happy Easter to the family that still runs an egg hunt for a seventeen-year-old. Long may it continue.
• Thinking of you this Easter. The daffodils by your gate were out first on the street again.
• Happy Easter. No big words. Just glad you are in our year.
• To the hosts: thank you for the lamb, the patience, and the extra chair that appeared from nowhere.
• Miles apart again this Easter. This card is smaller than the visit we owe you, and it knows it.
• Wishing you a gentle Easter: good weather for the walk, and nobody on cooking duty twice.
• Happy Easter. May this spring be the start of the thing you kept putting off in January.

Spring only, when faith is not the point

For the lapsed, the other-faith and the none-of-the-above, the season itself is real and shared, and a spring card is not a watered-down Easter card. Two rules. Do not smuggle church in through the back door with words like 'blessed' and hope they will not notice the smell of it. And do not open by apologising for the card ('I know you don't do Easter, but...'), because a card that apologises for existing has spent its whole budget before it says anything.

• Happy spring. The light is back in the evenings, and so, unfortunately, is next door's lawnmower at eight in the morning.
• No church, no eggs, just this: have a bright start to spring.
• Wishing you the first warm weekend of the year, and one slow morning somewhere inside it.
• Happy Easter. Yours is the chocolate-and-long-weekend kind, and I hope both hold out until Tuesday.
• Spring greetings to the person who has already planted too much. Same here. It is a good problem to have.
• May your April be kind, and your hay fever brief.
• A card for the season turning: longer days, lighter coats, better walks. Happy spring.
• Thinking of you as the evenings open up. Coffee in the garden soon, when it is warm enough to sit out.

Writing for Pascha, the May one

A Pascha card is written to people coming out of a seven-week fast. Great Lent began on March 15 in 2027, so by May 2 the register is not spring freshness, it is relief and appetite: candlelight at the midnight service, the fast broken, a table that groans. The greeting is 'Christos Anesti', Christ is risen, and if it is written to you, the reply is 'Alithos Anesti'. The egg on a Pascha table is dyed red and it has a job to do, so greetings that treat eggs as decoration miss by a mile. If you are a March person writing to a May household, your main skill is patience: the best Pascha card is often the one you did not send five weeks early. Short versions of most of these travel fine by text or free ecards when the post has run out.

• Christos Anesti! Thinking of you as the fast breaks and the table fills.
• For May 2, not March 28, because I checked this year. Christos Anesti to the whole family.
• Wishing you a blessed Pascha: candlelight at midnight, red eggs, and a long lunch after the long fast.
• Kalo Pascha. May your tsoureki rise better than mine did the year I tried.
• To the family that keeps the real Easter in May: no daffodils from us in March this year. Christos Anesti.
• Happy Pascha. Seven weeks of fasting deserves more than a card, but a card is what fits in the post.
• Christ is risen! Greetings to everyone at the table, and save me a piece of the lamb I will only hear about.

Short lines that fit under a signature

Enclosure cards, basket tags, the group card where your slot is exactly one line: short is its own discipline. A short line is not a lazy line if it carries one true thing, and it is not a warm line if it could be pasted under any name in the phone book. These are built to sit under a signature or on a tag tied to a basket.

• He is risen. Love, all of us.
• Happy Easter. See you at lunch.
• Christos Anesti, from the March card people.
• Spring at last. With love.
• Blessed Easter, to you and yours.
• Thinking of you today. That is the whole card.
• For the basket: happy hunting, and check behind the shed.
• With love this Easter, and in every ordinary week as well.
• Pascha blessings. May 2, as it should be.

The first Easter after a hard year

Everything on the ladder drops two rungs for this card. Do not use the resurrection as comfort for somebody else's loss unless they have used that language to you first, in their own words, about their own grief. Name the person who is missing if you knew them; a card that writes around the empty chair is felt as exactly that. Send it to arrive before the day if you can, because the day itself is full and loud, and write 'no need to reply' and mean it, because a card that demands a performance of gratitude is one more job. These are plainer than the rest of this page on purpose.

• Thinking of you this Easter, and of your dad. The first spring is a strange country. No need to reply.
• No big Easter words this year. Just: we are here, the kettle works, and you can come and sit in the garden any time.
• Wishing you a quiet Easter. Quiet is a perfectly good size for a holiday this year.
• I will not say he is in a better place. I will say we miss him at this table, and there is a chair here with your name on it.
• Happy Easter feels like the wrong size of sentence this year, so here is a smaller one: I am thinking of you, and of her, this weekend.
• For the first Easter in the new house, after the year you have had: may it be gentle, and may the neighbours be kind.

Signing it: names, order and the church group card

Sign with the names the reader actually uses for you. If she has called you by a nickname for forty years, the formal version of your name on a card reads like it came from a solicitor. In a couple's signature, the name that goes first is the person the reader knows best: it is a rule of recognition, not etiquette, and getting it backwards makes a card feel addressed to the wrong house. Children go after the adults, in the order they arrived, and a grown child who has not lived at home for years can be signed for in the message itself ('and love from Tom, who insists he is thriving in the new flat') rather than stacked into the signature like a minor. Pets sign nothing. A paw print is charming on a card to a four-year-old and baffling on every other mantel in the street.

Church group cards have their own mechanics, and they are mostly about reading order. The card will be read aloud or passed hand to hand, so write your line where it will be read in sequence, not in the first empty space you find, and keep it to one line, because the sixth signer to write a paragraph has eaten the seventh signer's slot. Sign your full name. There are four people called David. And the organiser's deadline is a real deadline even when it is delivered as a joke in the notices: a line that arrives after the card has been handed over gets read out to an empty room, to nobody, by a person holding a casserole. The what-to-write-in-a-mothers-day-card pillar works through the same signing-order problem for May, if your spring card list runs that long.

Celia's piano went in 2018, to a family in Frome who answered the advert within the hour. The gap it left in her front room is still exactly piano-shaped, seven years on, and she has put nothing in it: no chair, no plant, no bookcase. Visitors stand in it to talk, the way you would stand in a doorway, and she hands them their tea there. She says the room sounds better with the space in it. She may be right.

Turn it into a group card

Easter is a group-card holiday in two specific places. The first is the church card, which circulates for two Sundays and collects signatures from people who will never all be in the room at once. The second is the family card to the household you will not see: the May cousins, the March in-laws, the table you are missing this year. A group card with multiple signers handles both without the envelope doing a tour of three counties. One link goes out, each person writes their own line at their own rung of the ladder, and nobody has to chase the card down a church hall. You can create a card online in a couple of minutes, set the deadline for the Thursday before the Sunday you mean, and let the late lines be the ones that arrive as texts, where late is forgiven.