Tanti auguri di Buon Natale e Felice Anno Nuovo a tutti!
Do you want to send some Italian Christmas greetings this year? Perhaps, you’d also like to say Happy New Year and show off your Italian subjunctive… Here are some suggestions, pick the ones that suit you best!
The most common of our Italian Christmas and New Year greetings is: ‘Buon Natale e Felice Anno Nuovo’, which literally means ‘Good Christmas and Happy New Year’, but it works like your ‘Merry Christmas and Happy New Year’. If you want, you could add ‘Tanti auguri di’ (many wishes of) in front and as a result it would be ‘Tanti auguri di Buon Natale e Felice Anno Nuovo’ and if you’re sending it to a family, you could also add ‘a tutti voi’ at the end to say ‘to you all’: Tanti auguri di Buon Natale a tutti voi.
If you want to express your hopes and wishes for your friends’ new year, things get a little more complex as the subjunctive is required… ‘Che il Nuovo Anno vi porti’ means ‘I wish that the New Year will bring you’ and afterwards you could add what you think your friends need most, for example: felicità (happiness), salute (health), amore (love), prosperità (prosperity, which is a nice way to say soldi, money, love (amore). We can also say ‘Che il 2014 vi porti’, instead of Nuovo Anno. If the card is for a single person you should use the indirect pronoun ‘ti’ (to you singular) instead of ‘vi’ (to you plural). You might be wondering about the use of capital letters: I use capital letters for Felice Anno Nuovo, which is not compulsory, but it is a sort of traditional way to write these wishes. Let us know if you would like some help with your personal Italian Christmas and New Year wishes, I will be happy to craft them for you!