What to Write in an Easter Card

Easter cards are harder than they look because the occasion is two different things depending on the house it arrives in.

For one household it is the most significant day of the religious year. For another it is a long weekend, chocolate and the first proper light of the year. A card written for one and delivered to the other lands wrong in a way people rarely mention and always notice.

So the first decision is which card you are writing.

If they are religious and you are not

Write warmly about what the day means to them without performing a belief you do not hold.

Something like: thinking of you this Easter, and hoping the day is everything it should be for you and the family. Or, more directly: I know this weekend matters to you. I hope it is a good one.

That is honest, it is warm, and it does not require you to write a sentence you do not mean. Attempting the theological register when it is not yours reads as awkward from the first line, and a religious reader spots it immediately.

If you are close to them, ask what they are doing. Church at a particular time, a particular service, a meal afterward. Naming that in the card is the specific detail that makes it theirs.

If you are both religious

Then write it properly and do not hedge. The traditional greetings exist, they carry a great deal, and a card that uses them plainly is better than one that circles.

Add one personal line underneath. The greeting is shared by everyone. The line beneath it is yours.

If neither of you is

Then it is a spring card, and spring is a genuinely good subject that most people underuse.

Renewal, light, starting again, the fact that the year has turned. Easter is the point in the calendar where the weather changes and everybody feels slightly different, and a card that names that is doing something real rather than something seasonal-by-default.

Something like: happy Easter. It is finally light in the evenings and I have decided to be a different person about it. Come for lunch.

For children

Write about the specific thing they are going to do, not about the season.

A card that says happy Easter is from a shop. A card that says I hear there is a hunt in your garden on Sunday and I am formally betting you find more than your brother is from a person.

If you are sending chocolate, mention it, because a six year old reading a card wants to know whether there is chocolate. Do not make them find out by shaking the envelope.

A fact worth putting in

The egg tradition is older and better documented than most people assume.

The University of Plymouth notes that eggs symbolized new life, with the chick emerging read as resurrection and the oval shape associated with the stone rolled from the tomb, and that early Christians stained eggs red for the blood of the crucifixion. Edward I household records show 450 eggs bought in 1290, to be colored and covered in gold leaf.

The chocolate version is much more recent. Solid chocolate eggs were made in France and Germany in the early 1800s, with J.S. Fry and Sons producing one in Britain in 1873 and Cadbury in 1875.

The White House Easter Egg Roll started in 1878 under Rutherford and Lucy Hayes, after children had been rolling eggs at the Capitol until Congress stopped it. It is described as one of the few events in Washington that was never segregated, which is a striking thing to know about an egg roll.

For grandparents

Easter is a quieter family occasion than Christmas, which makes it a good one for the card that says something you have been meaning to say.

The pressure is lower. Nobody is expecting a big gesture, which means a longer or more sincere message is not competing with anything and does not read as an announcement.

If there is a specific memory of Easters when you were small, that is the card. The dyed eggs, the particular walk, the thing they always made. Older relatives are rarely told which of the ordinary things they did was the one that stuck.

For a family you are visiting

Keep it to the household and keep it short, and if there will be children there, write separately to them rather than adding a line at the end of the adults card.

Children receive very few cards addressed only to them, and a separate envelope with their own name on it is a considerably bigger event than a mention. It costs one more card.

The date

Easter moves more than any other major date, which affects when to post.

The rule from the US Naval Observatory: the first Sunday following the first ecclesiastical full moon that falls on or after the vernal equinox, with the moon taken from tables and the equinox fixed at 21 March. It can never fall before 22 March or after 25 April. Easter 2027 is 28 March.

For someone grieving

Easter is a resurrection festival, which makes it a complicated weekend for anybody who has lost somebody recently, and that goes double if they are religious.

Do not reach for the metaphor. Write plainly: thinking of you this weekend, which I imagine is a hard one. No pressure to reply. There is more on that in what to say when someone dies.

For what goes with the card, Easter gift ideas and Easter basket ideas for adults. The what to write hub has the other occasions.