What to Write in a Hanukkah Card

Almost every wrong Hanukkah card is wrong in the same way. It is a Christmas card with the nouns changed: the same cadence, the same list of wishes, the same seasonal warmth, with a menorah where a tree would be.

Readers notice this instantly, and what it communicates is that the writer was thinking about December rather than about them.

Start with the greeting

Happy Hanukkah works. It is used constantly in English and there is nothing lesser about it.

If you want a Hebrew greeting, chag sameach means happy festival and is widely used, and chag urim sameach means happy festival of lights, which is specific to Hanukkah and rather lovely. Chag chanukah sameach and simply chanukah sameach are both common in Israel.

Use one of them or use English. What does not work is stacking three of them, which reads as a person hedging.

The spelling does not matter

Hanukkah, Chanukah, Hanukah and several others are all in use. The variants exist because the Hebrew letter chet has no direct English equivalent, so transliteration produces different results. My Jewish Learning notes that Hanukkah is the most common English spelling today, that Chanukah was once preferred and remains so among traditionalists, and that none of these choices is inherently superior.

So pick one and stop worrying. Nobody is grading you, and the anxiety about it is the single most common reason people put off sending a card at all.

For close family and friends

Greeting, one specific line, one wish. The specific line does the work.

If they host every year, say something about the smell of their kitchen in December. If a child in the house is old enough to light the candles for the first time this year, that is your card. If somebody has had a hard twelve months, name it briefly and then wish them forward.

For example: Happy Hanukkah. I am still thinking about last year's latkes and I would like to formally apply to come again. Wishing you eight quiet nights and a house full of people.

The instinct to write more is usually wrong. Three sentences with one true detail beat twelve sentences of goodwill.

For colleagues

Two sentences.

Happy Hanukkah. Hope you get some proper time with your family.

Resist adding anything about the season generally, which is where a colleague card usually goes wrong. If your office does a general end-of-year thing as well, that is a separate message.

The other error at work is the merged greeting. Sending somebody you know to be Jewish a card wishing them happy holidays, when you would have sent a Christmas card to a colleague you knew to be Christian, is the specific thing a Hanukkah card exists to avoid. Address the festival.

For a family you are visiting

If you are attending a night, a card left with the gift is a nice touch and it should be aimed at the household rather than at an individual. Thank them for including you, which is genuinely how it will have been meant, and say something about wanting to learn how the candles work rather than pretending to know.

That last part is worth saying out loud. Guests often perform more familiarity than they have, and it is more charming to be openly new to something than to be quietly approximate about it. There is more on the gift side in Hanukkah host gift ideas.

For a child

Children receive fewer cards at Hanukkah than they do at a birthday, so one addressed to them personally lands hard.

Write to the child, not to the household, and use their name first. If they are lighting the candles for the first time, or reciting a blessing on their own, that is the card and it should be about almost nothing else. Children are told they are loved constantly and told they were noticed far less often.

If a child is old enough to read but young enough to still be proud of the fact, write more than you would to an adult. They will read it several times.

When you are sending it late

Hanukkah moves, and every year a large number of people discover it has already started, or already finished, while they were still thinking about December.

Send it anyway, and say so in the first line rather than apologizing at the end. Something like: this is late and I am sending it regardless, because I thought about you on the fourth night and did nothing about it until now.

A late card that admits it is late is charming. A late card that pretends otherwise makes the reader do the arithmetic.

What not to mention

The oil miracle is the story everybody reaches for, and it is worth knowing that it is a later rabbinic account. It appears in the Talmud, in Tractate Shabbat, completed roughly six hundred years after the events of the Maccabees. The historical core is a revolt and the rededication of the Temple.

None of which means you cannot mention the oil. It does mean a card that lectures confidently about what Hanukkah is really about is a card that has picked an argument, and the safest ground is light, family and food, which is what the festival is like to live through.

The card that is not a card

Something I say about most occasions and mean here too: the messages people keep have a fact in them. A year, a dish, a name, a difficulty acknowledged.

That is the same reasoning behind a song written about someone, which we make at Ditty City, so weigh it accordingly. What to include in a personalized song is about picking the details that carry weight, and it applies just as well to four lines in a card.

The what to write hub has the rest, what to write in a Christmas card is the December cousin, and Hanukkah gifts for eight nights covers what goes with the card.