What to Write in a Nowruz Card (Send It Before the Minute)

First, work out which of the four Nowruz cards you are writing

People say "a Nowruz card" as if there was one object. There are four, and they do different jobs, at different lengths, on different days. A card that tries to do two of these jobs at once usually does the first one badly.

The standalone card is the one most readers here are writing. It is sent ahead, read before or at the turning, and it carries the whole greeting by itself. Give it three to five sentences: the greeting, one true detail, one wish that belongs to this person.

The enclosure note travels inside something else: the envelope with eidi money for a child, a gift box, a bunch of hyacinths handed over at a door. Two sentences at most, because the money or the flowers do half the talking. Its one real job is to be signed. An unsigned note inside an envelope of new banknotes becomes a puzzle the family solves at the table by handwriting comparison, and somebody always gets thanked for money they did not send.

The visiting card is taken, not sent. During did-o-bazdid, the round of visits in the days after the equinox, younger relatives call on older ones first, and a card carried in a coat pocket and left on the table can be shorter than a posted one. It can mention the visit itself, the tea, the drive over. You are standing in their kitchen, so it does not need to explain that you are thinking of them.

The thirteenth-day note closes the festival. Sizdah Bedar, on Friday 2 April 2027, takes everyone out of the house for a picnic, and the sabzeh from the table goes into running water. A note handed over at the picnic is a different register again: lighter, outdoors, a little superstitious in a way the family itself finds funny. Four objects. Pick one, and write only that one.

The deadline is a minute, not a date

Post and courier services do not care about the equinox. You have to. Count backwards from 20:24 UTC on Saturday 20 March 2027 and be honest about what the post actually takes. A card posted the previous Monday inside the same country is a plan. A card posted on the Friday to another continent is a hope, and hopes should be sent as a message at the minute itself, with the card following behind.

There is no shame in that two-part version. Families across time zones do it every year. Send the short line at the turning, timed to their clock rather than yours, and let the card arrive during the visiting days saying so plainly: the card was meant for the table, the message was for the minute. What reads badly is silence at the minute and a card on day nine pretending it was there all along.

Chaharshanbe Suri, the fire festival on the evening of Tuesday 16 March 2027, is the unofficial start of the season, and a good posting deadline for anything crossing an ocean. If a card is in an envelope by the night people jump over small bonfires, asking the fire to take their pallor and give them its warmth, it will almost certainly be on the table when the year turns. I use that night as my own cutoff now. It has not failed me since the Glendale card.

Start with one greeting, spelled the way your recipient spells it

One Persian greeting per card. That is the dosage rule, whether you speak Persian or are borrowing the words for one card a year. Stack three transliterated greetings in a row and the card stops sounding like you and starts sounding like a search result. Pick the one that fits the relationship, and write the rest in your own plain English.

For most cards, Nowruz mobarak is enough. It means, roughly, a blessed new day, and it works for a grandmother, a neighbour and a work colleague without changing a letter. Sal-e no mobarak is the plainer happy new year, word for word. Eyd-e shoma mobarak is the fuller, politer greeting, for elders and for anyone you would not address by a bare first name at the door. Eydet mobarak is its informal version, for friends who would laugh at the formal one.

Use transliteration, the Latin letters you are reading here. Do not copy Persian script from a website into a card unless you can read what you have pasted. Script copied carelessly can come out reversed or broken, and the person you are trying to honour is the one who will notice.

Spelling of the festival follows the family, not a style guide. Persian speakers usually write Nowruz or Norooz. Kurdish families often write Newroz. Azerbaijani families write Novruz, and Afghan families often write Nawroz, and their table carries haft mewa, seven dried fruits in syrup, rather than a haft-sin. None of these is a mistake for you to correct. Match the spelling on the invitation or the family group chat, and if you have neither, write Nowruz and carry on.

When a card comes back to you, reply briefly and return the greeting rather than topping it. Hamchenin means likewise, and it is a complete answer. A reply that runs to a paragraph about your own spring plans has missed the shape of the thing.

Lines for elders, who are visited and written to first

Order matters at Nowruz. The young go to the old, not the other way round, and the first calls and cards of the year belong to grandparents, older aunts and uncles, and the senior house in the family. Write these cards first, post these cards first, and use the full greeting in them. An elder who gets a warm card on day eleven, after the neighbours have been and gone, can do the arithmetic.

Name one true thing about their table or their year. The samanu they stirred for hours. The goldfish that survived another winter. A health scare that is over, mentioned plainly and only if the family talks about it openly. Keep the wish narrow. Six lines, written to be read aloud to whoever is in the room:

• Eyd-e shoma mobarak. I wish you strong health through the whole year, and a house that never empties at visiting time.
• Nowruz mobarak, and thank you for a table that half the family still measures every other table against.
• Wishing you a year as steady as your samanu is sweet. We will be at your door in the first days, as we should be.
• Sal-e no mobarak. The goldfish has outlasted another winter and so, I am glad to say, have you.
• May this year bring you good news early and often, and may your house stay the first house everyone wants to visit.
• Eyd-e shoma mobarak, with respect and with love. A hundred more years like this one, with all of us in the room.

Sign an elder's card with your full name if there is any doubt about which grandchild, niece or family friend you are. Big families hold several people with your first name.

The enclosure note that travels with eidi or a gift

Eidi is the new year gift of money, given by elders to children and sometimes to younger relatives, usually in new notes. Cards move in both directions around it: a giver tucks a note in with the money, and a child, or a parent for a small child, thanks the giver. Both notes are short, and both fail the same way when they try to be grand.

The giver's note needs a name, a blessing and nothing about amounts or what the money should buy. The note a parent writes back needs the child's name and one thing the child actually did with the day. Five lines, split between the two directions:

• Nowruz mobarak. This is for a book, a kite, or whatever your mother pretends not to approve of.
• Eydet mobarak. New year, new notes, and one rule from me: spend a little of it on something with no use at all.
• Thank you for her eidi. She read your note twice and has put the money in the tin with the broken hinge, which is her bank.
• Nowruz mobarak, and thank you. He announced at breakfast that he is saving for a bicycle pump, which is a sentence nobody expected.
• For the smallest person at the table: may your first Nowruz be the first of a great many, and may you sleep through the noisy part.

The same rule covers a note inside a gift that is not money. Name the gift once, in case card and parcel part company, and stop.

Lines for friends, and for family who are far from the table

Friends get the informal greeting and a shared reference. Family far from home get something else: a card that describes the table they are missing in one or two concrete strokes, without laying the missing on thick. The worst faraway card is a catalogue of everything they were not there for. The best one sends a single plate of it, and then talks about the year ahead.

Do not promise a visit you have not booked. Do not write that the table was not the same without them unless you can follow it with something specific, because that sentence alone is a small guilt delivered by post. Say who asked after them, by name. Say when you will call, and keep it. Six lines across the two registers:

• Eydet mobarak. Your sabzeh in the photograph is greener than mine and I am choosing to take that personally.
• Nowruz mobarak. Pick the weekend for that trip we keep postponing. I will bring the car and the bad playlist.
• Sal-e no mobarak. Your place was set at our table anyway, and your uncle defended your honour over the last piece of baklava.
• The year turned at 4:24 our time and your name came up before the candles were out. Nowruz mobarak, from all of us here.
• Nowruz mobarak. I have saved you the story about the fish, the mirror and the spilled sumac until you call, which should be soon.
• Wishing you a year with one piece of news you have been waiting on for a long time. You know the one I mean.

For a friend who marks the festival under a different spelling, use their spelling in the greeting line and yours nowhere. It costs you one word. It tells them you have been paying attention for longer than this one card.

Cards from outside the festival, and cards for work

Plenty of Nowruz cards are written by people who do not celebrate it: a colleague, a neighbour, a daughter-in-law in her second year of being family. These cards fail when they perform knowledge the writer does not have. They succeed when they are accurate about the small thing they do know, which is the person.

Keep an outsider card to three moves. Use the standard greeting, spelled Nowruz mobarak. Name one thing you know from this actual relationship, a project finished, a difficult winter, a child starting school. Close with a plain wish for health and a good year. Do not explain the festival back to the family, do not reach for a poem you cannot read, and do not call it a version of a festival you do celebrate.

At work, shorter still, and send it before the holiday rather than after. Many colleagues will be away visiting during the thirteen days, and a greeting that lands when they return reads as an afterthought with good stationery. Five lines for the outsider and the office:

• Nowruz mobarak to you and everyone at home. I hope the year starts gently and the visiting is the good kind of tiring.
• Nowruz mobarak, and thank you for being the colleague everyone asks for by name. May the new year be easy on your inbox and your family alike.
• Nowruz mobarak. I do not know the festival well, but I know this family a little now, and I am glad to be at its edge.
• Wishing you and everyone at your table good health this Nowruz, from the neighbours at number twelve.
• Sal-e no mobarak. May the first day of spring bring you the news you have been hoping for since before winter.

A hard year, and the lines to leave out of the card

Some tables have an empty chair this year. Some families are marking the festival with a parent in hospital, a son in another country with no way home, or a house sold since last spring. The card still gets written. It gets written shorter, and it names the situation once, plainly, rather than decorating the card with renewal language and hoping the family does not notice the gap.

Spring imagery is the trap here. Growth, rebirth, everything blooming: fine words in an ordinary year, and a small cruelty in a bad one if aimed at the loss itself. Aim them at the living instead. Wish the family rest, fewer forms to fill in, one ordinary good week. Four lines in that register:

• Nowruz mobarak. No big wishes from me this year. Just rest, and a spring that asks less of all of you.
• Thinking of your table and of the chair that is empty at it. Sal-e no mobarak, and we are here in the weeks after, not only today.
• Eyd-e shoma mobarak. May this year bring your family fewer hard journeys and more evenings that end early and easily.
• Nowruz mobarak, with love. When the visiting starts, we will come to you, so nobody at your end has to travel anywhere.

And the lines to leave out, in a blockquote because none of them should ever be copied into a card:

Everything happens for a reason, and this spring is a fresh start for everyone. New year, new you, time to put last year behind you and bloom. At least the year can only get better from here. Happy Persian Christmas to the whole family.

Each of those sentences does something unkind while sounding cheerful. The fresh start instruction tells a grieving family to hurry. Write the plainer sentence instead, even if it feels too plain on the page. Plain is what people keep.

The thirteenth-day note, and the checks to run before you send

Sizdah Bedar gets its own small card because the day has its own customs. Families eat outside, the sabzeh is tied in knots by younger people making a wish before it goes into running water, and practical jokes are part of the day in many houses. A picnic note can be lighter than anything you wrote in March. Five lines:

• Happy Sizdah Bedar. May the knot you tie today come undone in exactly the way you are hoping.
• Nowruz mobarak, thirteen days on. I am bringing the bread, the cheese and no opinions about the weather.
• For the picnic: may the sabzeh carry off every small bad luck your house collected this winter.
• Sizdah Bedar mobarak. If a joke is played on me today, I want it on record that I suspected nothing and trusted everyone.
• Thank you for thirteen days of being fed, visited and telephoned. The year has started properly.

Then run the checks, because most Nowruz card mistakes are mechanical. One: will it arrive before the minute, and if not, have you sent the short line that covers the minute itself. Two: is there exactly one Persian greeting, in the register this recipient would use. Three: have you spelled the festival the way the family spells it. Four: have you named one true detail, a dish, an object, a person who asked after them. Five: is it signed with a name the household can place without detective work. Two minutes, and the card that reaches the table is the one you meant to send.

Turn it into a group card

A family spread over four time zones has a practical problem that has nothing to do with wording: a grandmother's card has to collect lines from people who are never awake at the same time, and reach her before a minute that falls at a different hour in every house. That is the one job a group card does better than paper.

A group card with multiple signers lets each household add its line when its own day allows, and the whole thing can still be sent to land ahead of the equinox. You can create a card online in a couple of minutes, set the deadline a clear day before the turning rather than on it, and let the cousins in one country stop depending on the cousins in another to post anything.

The same one-detail rule works at other tables. The shipped Lunar New Year wishes bank sorts its lines by who receives them, and the Diwali wishes collection shows how much work a single named lamp, dish or journey does in a short line. Readers assembling a family's contributions for the first time will find the mechanics in the family e-card guide.

The cracked terracotta pot on my fire escape has held the same tomato plant since May, tied to the rail with a length of blue twine I cut from a parcel. It produced two tomatoes. One ripened properly and one was taken, half green, by an animal I never saw, though the bite marks suggested confidence. I have not moved the pot or replaced the twine, and the plant is still putting out small yellow flowers it cannot possibly do anything with now.