What to Write in a Lohri Card (Address It to a Person, Not a Household)

Start with the addressee, not the greeting

A Lohri card has a delivery problem that most festival cards do not. The celebration belongs to a household. One fire, one sweets tray, one garden or hall full of people who are related in at least four different ways. So the card gets addressed to the household too, and a household cannot feel thanked, welcomed, or remembered the way a person can. Somebody has to be able to say: that one was for me.

So decide the addressee before you decide anything else. Name one person on the envelope and in the first line, even when the card will be read aloud to the whole room. The host who built the fire is one addressee. The grandmother whose recipes are on the tray is another. The cousin who married in this year, the baby meeting the fire for the first time, the friend who drove forty minutes in January dark: each of those is a card. 'To everyone' is a notice. A name is a card.

If two people genuinely share the occasion, write two short cards instead of one long one. A first Lohri after a wedding is the clearest case. The spouse who grew up with the festival needs a different sentence from the spouse who is being folded into it, and squeezing both into one card usually means the newcomer gets a line about 'joining our traditions' that reads like a terms document. Two envelopes. Two first lines. The fire is the same.

The greeting is a decision, and so is the Punjabi line

Happy Lohri and Lohri Mubarak are both in everyday use, and families tend to have a house version. Copy the version the family itself uses on its own cards and messages. If you have never seen one, Happy Lohri is the safe default in English, and asking the person who invited you takes ten seconds and saves a winter of quietly using the wrong register in a house that notices these things.

The Punjabi greeting runs 'Lohri diyan lakh lakh vadhaiyan'. A lakh is a hundred thousand, so the line wishes the reader congratulations at a scale English cannot do politely. In a card it belongs at the top or in the sign-off, spelled with care, and translated in brackets when the card is travelling outside the family. Keep it to that single line. A page of roman Punjabi from a writer who does not speak the language hands the reader homework on the one night of the year they booked for standing by a fire and eating.

Never lift Gurmukhi lettering off a greetings site when you cannot read a word of it, just to make the card look the part. I have seen a copied line arrive with a word wrong in a way that changed the blessing into something closer to a weather report, and the person who spotted it was, predictably, the grandmother the card was meant to impress. Roman script, honestly spelled, is welcome everywhere I have ever sent it. Guessed script is a gamble with somebody else's language.

For family: write to one chair by the fire

Family lines below are each addressed to one person doing one job on the night: lighting the fire, running the kitchen, holding the baby, knowing the songs. That is the whole method for a household festival. If the line you are about to send could go unchanged to the entire gathering, it is a group message wearing a card's clothes. Add the job, the seat, or the dish and it becomes a card for somebody.

• Happy Lohri, Aunty. Your seat by the fire is saved, your rewari is counted, and nobody is allowed to start the singing until you have had your tea.
• Lohri Mubarak to the cousins who actually build the fire. The rest of us just stand near it looking traditional. Thank you for the wood, the matches, and the patience.
• Happy Lohri, Dad. First handful of popcorn for the flames, first til laddoo on the plate, and a year where your knees let you dance one full song before you sit down and supervise.
• To the house that feeds January like it is a guest who might stay: Happy Lohri. May the panjiri last past the weekend this year. It will not, but a card is allowed to hope.
• Happy Lohri to our family thread, forty-one people strong and planning since Diwali. We argued about the date for a week. We were all at the same fire anyway.
• Lohri wishes to the uncle who knows the second verse. Sing it slowly this year. Half the garden is lip-syncing and relying on you.

For parents and grandparents: the warm seat is the message

With elders, the respectful Lohri card does two concrete things. It gives them the place of honour in words (the chair nearest the fire, the first serving, the song nobody starts without them) and it wishes them a year of health in plain language, without turning the wish into a medical review. Avoid commenting on an elder's age, appetite, or mobility beyond one affectionate detail you know they joke about themselves. If they do not joke about it, the card should not either.

• Happy Lohri, Grandad. May the fire be lit before you have to ask, your chair be the one closest to it, and the year ahead need very little explaining.
• Lohri Mubarak, Grandma. Everything on the sweets tray learned its job from you, including the people carrying it.
• Happy Lohri, Mum. You have run this evening for as long as I have been alive to attend it. Sit near the fire this year and let the evening come to you for once.
• To my father-in-law, on his first Lohri in our house: the warm seat is yours, the first rewari is yours, and the singing improves after the second song. It always does.
• Happy Lohri to the oldest person at our fire. May your health hold as steady as your opinions about how the wood should be stacked.

If the elder is not there this year, say that in the card instead of writing as if the video call closes the distance. It does not, and a sentence that admits the empty chair reads as love. A photograph of the fire sent the same evening, with the card to follow by post, is a better Lohri than a perfect card that arrives in February pretending January went as planned.

For friends, and the work card that stays a work card

Friends can take the loud version: the singing, the rewari debts, the annual argument about the size of last year's fire. A colleague is a different write. Keep a work Lohri card to one greeting line and one specific sentence about working with them, skip the religious vocabulary unless you know the colleague uses it themselves, and never let the card do duty as a festival explainer. A Punjabi colleague does not need their own festival summarised back to them by the office, however warm the summary is feeling that day.

• Happy Lohri. You bring the peanuts, the playlist, and the strong view that last year's fire was bigger. It was not. I measured nothing, but I stand by this.
• Lohri Mubarak to the friend driving over tonight. Come before sunset, park where you can leave, and save me from the first round of photographs.
• Happy Lohri to my work friend who asked what Lohri was in October and is now in charge of popcorn. That is how this festival recruits.
• Wishing you a Lohri with a fire you did not have to build, food you did not have to cook, and a chair that is not the wobbly one.
• Happy Lohri. May your gajak be fresh, your hands warm, and your name spelled right on at least one card this year. This one checked twice.
• Lohri wishes, from the person who still owes you a bag of rewari from last January. Consider this card a promise with a date on it this time.

One timing rule covers friends, family, and work alike, and it is stricter than it looks. The celebration happens after dark, once the fire is lit, so the card's deadline is sunset on the day itself. For 2027 the date to plan around is Wednesday 13 January, though the Drik Panchang calendar for New Delhi puts the observance on the 14th, which is why the family's own date, not a search result, settles it. Beat the sunset and you are punctual. Arrive the next morning and the card becomes a review of an evening it was not part of.

A baby's first Lohri: write the card that gets kept

A baby's first Lohri is a presentation, not a date. The child is carried to the fire, the extended family gathers, presents and sweets change hands, and the mother sits with the baby at the centre of an evening the baby will remember not at all. Which settles the addressing question in an unusual way: you are writing to the parents, on the record, for a reader who will meet the card years later. So date it. Name where the fire was. Put in one fact about the night that will not survive anywhere else, the suit the baby wore, who held her during the drumming, what she slept through.

• For your first Lohri, little one, dated and kept: you slept through the fire, woke for the drumming, and were held by eleven people before the sweets tray came round. Grow up knowing January starts like this.
• Happy first Lohri to the baby and to the parents reading this over her shoulder. She will not remember the fire. You will, every year, so this card is really yours.
• Lohri Mubarak to the newest name on the family list. First fire, first rewari refused on your behalf, and a grandmother already planning next year at twice the size.
• To the parents, for the keeping box: on your daughter's first Lohri the fire was lit at five, she wore the red suit from her aunt, and she slept through Sunder Mundriye entirely. That is the whole report.
• Happy first Lohri. May the photographs from tonight embarrass you pleasantly in about sixteen years, the way first Lohri photographs are supposed to.

Keep predictions out of this card. Lines about what the baby will become, how tall, how brilliant, which profession, are the first thing parents skim, because every first Lohri card contains one and they are all interchangeable. A dated fact beats a prophecy every time, and the grown child reading the card at eighteen will agree with the parents.

First Lohri after a wedding: write to the newcomer

The couple's first Lohri has a host family, a guest list, and presents for the new spouse, who is dressed up, seated centrally, and welcomed at a volume that can feel like an exam if the card gets it wrong. The line that does the work in this card is not a blessing on the marriage. It is evidence of membership: you are expected, your seat is saved, you already know where things live in this house. Write that to the newcomer directly, by name, and let the spouse who grew up with the festival get the shorter, teasing version in their own card.

• Happy first Lohri in this family. The fire is loud, the portions are not a suggestion, and the seat saved for you near the flames is the point of this card: you are expected now.
• Lohri Mubarak to the newest member of the household. One winter in and you already know where the extra chairs live. That is membership. The ceremony tonight just confirms it.
• To my sister, on her first Lohri in a new house in a new town: may their fire feel like yours by the second song, and may you ring us before the sweets run out, not after.
• Happy first Lohri together. Two families, one fire, and no tally kept of whose rewari vanished first. A good first year starts exactly like that.
• Lohri wishes to the couple, and in particular to the one who married in: the family that wrote this card has been rehearsing your welcome since the wedding. Tonight is the performance.

The card that travels with the sweets

A large share of Lohri cards are not cards at all. They are the folded note inside a box of gajak, rewari, or til laddoo handed over at a door, sent with a driver, or left with a neighbour who is hosting. That note has a different job from a posted card. It has to say who the box is from before it says anything else, because festival sweets arrive in fleets and an unsigned box becomes anonymous by the second day. Keep it to three lines at most, name the food that matters in the box, and put your name where a tired host will find it at midnight: at the top.

• Happy Lohri. These went into the fire's honour and the rest into the box: eat the rewari first, it goes soft by Thursday.
• For the house on Lohri night, with thanks for the fire: gajak travels, popcorn does not, so this box is mostly gajak.
• Lohri Mubarak. A small bag for a big evening. The til laddoo are from Mum's batch, which is the entire recommendation.
• Happy Lohri from next door. Heard the drumming, smelled the fire, sent the sweets round before we talked ourselves out of it.

What to leave out of a Lohri card

Four lines turn up in Lohri cards every year and quietly undo them. They are worth seeing written down, because each one sounds warm until you read it as the person receiving it.

Happy Lohri, the Punjabi Diwali! Wishing the whole family prosperity and light.

Lohri is not a smaller edition of a bigger festival. It has its own date, its own fire, and its own food, and merging it tells the reader the card was written from a search result rather than from knowing them. The prosperity-and-light pairing is the other problem: it could be pasted into any winter card for any household in the country.

To the new bride, welcome to our family and our traditions. May you learn to love Lohri as we do.

The welcome is real and the wording is a condition. 'Our traditions' plus 'may you learn' puts the newcomer on probation in the middle of her own celebration. The fix costs nothing: write what she already is, a member whose seat is saved, and leave the curriculum out of it.

Wishing you health, wealth, success, happiness, peace and prosperity this Lohri and always!

Six blessings in one sentence means none of them was chosen. Pick the one that is true for this person this year (health for the grandfather, rest for the new parents, a quiet February for the friend who has had a loud year) and let the other five go. A card is judged on the line that could only be theirs.

Also leave out eating jokes aimed at a named person, comments about a new mother's rest or appearance at a first Lohri, and any line in a language you had to copy character by character. If you cannot write it from memory, you cannot stand behind it, and Lohri night is a poor time to find out what you actually sent.

Turn it into a group card

Lohri gathers people who are now scattered by design: cousins in three time zones, a sibling at university, the relatives who left town for work years ago. A household card signed by one person flattens all of that into 'from all of us', which is the fridge-magnet problem again at group scale. A shared group card solves it by giving every signer a separate space with a separate name on it. Set one up, create the card online, and circulate the link a day or two early with a deadline people can actually meet: signed by sunset, not by the weekend.

The closest festival neighbours work the same way. The Diwali wishes bank is the sibling for another fire-and-sweets season with its own greeting decisions, the Lunar New Year wishes cover the other January-to-February greeting window, and the 1st birthday wishes are the next kept-card occasion for most first Lohri babies. Use them for structure if you like. The lines still have to come from your fire, your tray, and your people.

Navdeep's fridge magnet, since you ask, outlasted the card. The card came down in March, but the little mango is still up there holding a school letter and half a takeaway menu, and Navdeep sends me a photograph of it most Januaries without any comment at all. I have never asked him to take it down. Some reminders should be allowed to keep their job.