A Middle River woman, typically a fan of playing bingo and the occasional scratch-off, was at Baker’s Tavern on New Year’s Day when she purchased a Maryland Lottery Holiday Raffle ticket.
The last opportunity to buy Holiday Raffle tickets was that day. The purchase gave her a fortuitous start to 2026 as it put her in a group of 10 people who won $100,000.
After she claimed the prize Jan. 12 at Lottery headquarters in Baltimore, she and her husband related the story of how she realized she had a winning ticket.
She was in bed the evening after the Jan. 2 drawing checking out social media when she noticed the Holiday Raffle winning numbers. It caught her eye immediately that one of the winning tickets had been sold at Baker’s Tavern at 2233 Old Eastern Avenue in Middle River. Her husband wasn’t home at the time so she called him. She was pretty sure it was her ticket that had won because she thought she remembered the number.
But the ticket was still in her car. The outside temperature that day was in the upper 20s to mid-30s, but the winner says she has no recollection of how cold it was, or anything else about the weather.
“I ran to my car to check the ticket!” she said. “I was in major shock!” she recounted of the moment she realized she’d won $100,000. Days later upon claiming the prize, she was still struggling to wrap her head around the situation.
“It hasn’t really hit me yet,” she said.
Though thrilled about the win, the couple has rather ordinary plans for the money.
“We’re going to save and invest for retirement.”
A celebratory dinner, however, is also part of the plan.
The Maryland Lottery Holiday Raffle ran Nov. 3 through Jan. 1, with winning numbers drawn on Jan. 2, including for a top prize of $1 million and 10 prizes of $100,000 each. The winning numbers – including 10,000 for prizes of $50 to $500 – were selected from among the 237,206 sequentially numbered tickets sold.
Tickets, numbered 000001 through 237206, were $20 each and were available at Maryland Lottery retailers across the state.
A list of all winning numbers is available on the Holiday Raffle page at mdlottery.com, and the page also has a search tool that can be used to check specific numbers to see if they are winners. Holiday Raffle tickets can also be checked by scanning them with the Maryland Lottery app, or at any Lottery retailer. Winners have 182 days from Jan. 2 to claim their prizes.
