What to Write in a Purim Card (Name the Filling, Sign the Tag)

First, work out which of the three Purim objects you are writing

Most bad Purim cards fail before the first sentence, because the writer never decided what the thing in their hand actually is. Purim produces three different pieces of writing, and they do three different jobs. A standalone card goes through the post or by hand a day or two early, and it carries the whole greeting on its own. A basket tag travels inside a mishloach manot basket, tied or tucked among the food, and it has one job the food cannot do, which is to say who the basket is from. A meal note is handed over at the festive meal itself, or left by a plate, and it can be as short as two lines because the writer is standing in the room. One text cannot do all three jobs well. The card that tries usually ends up long where it should be brief and vague where it should be specific.

Decide the object first, then take its length from the object, not from how much you feel. A standalone card earns four to seven sentences. A basket tag earns one or two, and the second one is optional. A meal note earns two or three, and one of them should be about the meal in front of you, not about Purim in general. If you are posting a card to someone in Jerusalem, remember that the city keeps Shushan Purim a day later, on Wednesday 24 March 2027, so a card that would be late everywhere else is on time there. Everywhere else the day is Tuesday 23 March 2027, beginning at sundown on Monday 22 March, and a card arriving on Thursday has missed the festival it was written for.

There is a fourth thing people try to make a card do, and it cannot. A card is not matanot la'evyonim, the gifts to the poor that belong to the day alongside the basket, the Megillah reading and the meal. You can mention in a card that you have given in someone's honour, if that is true and if they would like to know. You cannot let a warm paragraph stand in for the giving itself, and a card that announces generosity it has not performed reads badly to exactly the people who know the difference.

Start with a greeting you can actually say out loud

Three greetings cover almost every Purim card you will ever write, and picking between them is a question of who is receiving the card, not of how much Hebrew you know. Happy Purim is plain, correct and welcome everywhere. Chag Purim Sameach is the standard Hebrew greeting, roughly happy Purim festival, and it is the one you will hear in synagogues, schools and community centres. Ah Freilichen Purim is Yiddish, cheerful rather than merely happy, and it lands warmest with families where Yiddish is part of the furniture. Purim Sameach, without the Chag, is a shorter form some people prefer, and nobody worth writing to will mark you down for using it.

The dosage rule for writers who do not speak Hebrew or Yiddish is one line, translated in the same breath. Use the greeting once, at the top or in the sign-off, put its meaning right next to it in plain English, and write the rest of the card in the language you think in. A card with four transliterated phrases and no translations is not more respectful. It is harder to read, and it advertises effort instead of thought. I have used the same opening for years, to family friends and to a work contact alike, and it has never once been the wrong choice:

Chag Purim Sameach, a happy Purim to you and everyone at your table.

If someone greets you first, the reply is easy. You say the same greeting back, and you may add a thank you in front of it. There is no separate formal answer to learn, and inventing one makes a simple exchange strange. Write the greeting the way you would say it in their kitchen. If you would stumble over it out loud, shorten it until you would not.

Lines for family, where the card can lean on a shared year

Family cards can carry weight that no other Purim card should try to carry, because the reader shares the references. Name the table, the reading, the person who always does a particular job. One remembered detail from a past Purim does more than any blessing you can copy, because it proves the card was written for this house and no other. Keep the line count honest, though. A family card that lists five memories is a newsletter. Pick one.

• Chag Purim Sameach. I am thinking of last year at your table, the twins arguing over the last poppy seed hamantasch, and your father reading Haman's name in a voice he had clearly been saving since February.
• Happy Purim, with love. May your Megillah reading be loud in the right places, your meal run long, and somebody else be on washing up duty this year.
• For the keeper of our family's Purim: thank you for the costumes mended, the baskets packed and the grape juice remembered. Sit down this year. We have the kitchen.
• Purim Sameach to the house that taught me what a grogger is for. I still shake mine a beat late, every single time, in your honour.
• Wishing you a Purim with one true pleasure in it: a full table, a story you know by heart, and an afternoon with nowhere else to be.
• Ah Freilichen Purim. May the year turn for you the way the story turns, toward light, toward company, and toward a table that is glad you are at it.

Notice what those lines leave out. None of them retells the plot. Family readers know who Esther is, and a card that explains the festival to the people who taught it to you reads as distance, not devotion.

Lines for friends, where a joke is allowed to do the work

Friend cards are the one place Purim humour belongs in writing, because the festival itself makes room for it: costumes, noise, a villain booed on cue. Keep the joke aimed at the food, the noise or yourself. Age jokes have no home here, and neither does any line about drinking that assumes the reader drinks. Read each line out loud before you send it. If it does not sound like something you would say across a kitchen counter, it will not sound right on paper either.

• Happy Purim. Your costume last year set a standard this street has not recovered from, and I am writing in advance to say I expect worse.
• Chag Purim Sameach. The apricot ones are yours if you get here before the reading ends. After that I can promise nothing and will lie about it cheerfully.
• Purim Sameach, and thank you for the basket that arrived at the exact hour the afternoon was falling apart. The timing is still talked about here.
• For my favourite Megillah heckler: may your grogger be loud, your aim at Haman's name be perfect, and your plate hold only the fillings you picked first.
• Happy Purim from across the miles. I have eaten one apricot hamantasch in your honour and reported back, as agreed. It was excellent. You were missed.
• Wishing you a loud, sweet, slightly ridiculous Purim, which is the only correct kind, and a meal that lasts long enough to tell the good stories twice.

A short card to a friend beats a long one that arrives late. If you are writing on the morning of the day itself, cut the card to three sentences and hand it over in person rather than polishing a page that lands on Thursday.

The basket tag, the shortest card you will write all year

A mishloach manot basket needs at least two kinds of food, and in most houses it holds far more than that, but the writing on it has a stricter rule than the packing does. Sign it. An unsigned basket gets thanked to the wrong house, returned to the wrong door, and remembered as a mystery instead of a kindness. I learned that standing in Rivka's kitchen in Brookline, pen in hand, while she quietly rewrote my three drafts into one line that said who it was from and one thing that was true about what was inside. The tag is not the place for your feelings about the festival. It is the place for your name, one detail about the food or the day, and a greeting short enough to read while holding a basket.

• From Rivka and family, with apricot hamantaschen and love. Chag Purim Sameach, and may your reading be loud.
• Happy Purim from our kitchen to yours. The poppy seed ones were baked this morning. The grape juice is for the twins.
• For your table, from ours, with thanks for a year of borrowed chairs and returned dishes. Purim Sameach.
• Ah Freilichen Purim. Basket packed by four hands, two of them small and floury. Signed, so you know who to thank and who to blame.
• Chag Purim Sameach. This tag is the card. The basket is the rest of the sentence.
• With love and hamantaschen, for a neighbour who has earned both. Happy Purim, and the tin is yours to keep.

Write the tag before you pack the basket, not after. A tag written last gets written on whatever paper is nearest, in whatever pen is dying, and it shows. And put the tag where a hand finds it when the lid or cloth is lifted, on top, not wedged under the heaviest jar in the basket.

Lines for children, built on the costume and the noise

Cards for children should be built out of the parts of Purim a child actually lives: the costume that took a week, the grogger shaken at the villain's name, the play, the sweets. Leave the plot's violence out of a child's card entirely. A child does not need a written account of a planned massacre to enjoy the day, and parents reading the card over a small shoulder will not thank you for providing one. Name the costume. Name the noise. That is the whole method.

• Happy Purim to the noisiest reader in the room. Rattle that grogger at the villain, then rattle it once more because you can.
• Chag Purim Sameach to a queen with a paper crown. Yours stayed on for the whole reading, which is more than the real crown managed in most tellings.
• Purim Sameach. May your costume be the one everyone asks about, your hamantasch be the filling you picked, and your seat be near the front.
• For the hero of the Purim play: you remembered every line and the dragon tail. We were proud enough to embarrass you, and we have photos.
• Happy Purim. Eat the apricot one slowly. It is the best one, and this is a secret between us and the baker.

For a child who was in the Purim play, the card is a review, and it should read like one: what they played, the moment they nailed, the prop that misbehaved. Children keep these. Write the one they will still be glad to find in a drawer in five years.

Cards from outside the story, and cards for work

A non-Jewish writer does not need to sit Purim out, and a card from outside the story can be one of the best a family receives, precisely because it cost the writer a little thought. The rules are plain. Greet the day correctly, say who you are if the relationship is not obvious, name one thing you are actually giving or glad about, and do not claim the history as yours. You can honour Esther's courage as a reader of the story. You should not write as though her people were your ancestors when they were not. That single distinction keeps an outsider card warm instead of presumptuous.

• Chag Purim Sameach, a happy Purim to you. I am the neighbour from two doors down, the one with the loud fence conversations, and these are for your table.
• Happy Purim. I do not share the story as my own, but I know a day of deliverance when I see one being celebrated, and I wanted to mark it with you.
• Purim Sameach, from a colleague who has learned more from your calendar than from any training session this year. Enjoy the day, properly and at length.
• For a first Purim basket from this house: hamantaschen, grape juice, and our good wishes, from people glad to live on your street.

For a work contact, take the last of those lines as the ceiling, not the floor. One greeting, one specific good wish, your name. A workplace Purim card that runs to three paragraphs about courage and destiny has mistaken a colleague for a congregation.

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

Some years a household is marking Purim with an empty chair, a hospital rota or a bill on the table, and the loud register of the festival can make a card feel like an instruction to cheer up. Do not instruct. Lower the volume, keep the greeting, and let the card carry company rather than festivity. A hard-year Purim card may be the only one that names the situation plainly, and plain naming, done gently, is a relief to receive.

• Purim Sameach. No basket performance from us this year, just this card and our love, and both are meant.
• Chag Purim Sameach. I know this year has rearranged your table. There is a seat in the story for grief as well as noise, and we are thinking of you in both.
• Happy Purim, quietly. The twins asked after you at the reading, by name, and I said you would want to be asked after, which I hope was right.
• For a Purim at home this year: the apricot ones travel well, the card is the visit for now, and our door is open when the day is easier.

And some lines should not be sent to anyone, in any year. These are the shapes to leave out, quoted so you can recognise them in your own draft:

May all your enemies end up like Haman, and soon.

You just need to be joyful today, it is a mitzvah, so no sad faces.

Esther fasted and was saved, so think of this hard time as your fast before the miracle.

The first wishes harm in a greeting card. The second orders a grieving person to perform. The third takes somebody else's suffering and turns it into a plot device with a promised ending nobody can promise. Cut any line of yours that sits near those three, however prettily it is phrased.

When to send it, and the checks to run before you do

Timing is a Purim card's second signature. The standalone card should arrive by Tuesday 23 March 2027, which means posting it the week before, not the weekend before, and hand delivery on Monday evening or Tuesday morning beats the post at any distance under a mile. The basket tag travels with the basket on the day. The meal note needs no planning at all, which is why it is the right rescue when the day has arrived and the card has not. Do not send a Purim card in the days after and call it belated with a joke. Send a plain note instead, say the day made you think of them, and leave the festival greeting out of a message that missed the festival.

Run four checks before any Purim card leaves your hand. Is your name on it, in letters a tired person can read at a doorway. Does it name one true thing, a filling, a costume, a reading, a chair, that could not be pasted into a card for a stranger. Is the greeting spelled the way the family spells it, if you have seen them write it. And have you kept the giving separate, so the card is a card and the charity is charity, each done properly and neither borrowing credit from the other. Four yeses, and the card is ready. Fewer than four, and five more minutes with the pen will fix it.

Turn it into a group card

A street, a class or an office often wants to greet one family together at Purim, and a single card passed hand to hand will reach the last signer after the day has ended. A group card with multiple signers solves the timing instead of apologising for it: one link, sent to everyone on Monday, each person adding a line and a name, and the finished card delivered inside the day it belongs to. You can create a card online in a few minutes, set who it is for, and let the signers come to it rather than chasing a sheet of paper around a building.

Keep the group card to the same rules as the tag. Every signer signs. One line each is plenty, and the organiser's line should name the street, class or team so the family knows which crowd is greeting them. For other festivals on the same crowded calendar, the shipped holiday card messages bank covers the wider season, and the Diwali wishes collection shows the same one true detail method working on a different festival table. Readers who like a worked example of a family card assembled step by step will find one in the family birthday e-card guide, and the method transfers to Purim without changing a single rule.

The paper crown from that March in Brookline is still on Rivka's bookshelf, between a cookbook with a broken spine and a plant that nobody in that house will admit to owning. Her daughter has outgrown the costume twice over. Nobody throws the crown away, and nobody can say whose job keeping it is.