Christmas Cards give way to E-cards - sort of

As I start to send out Christmas Cards e-cards, having mailed the paper Christmas Cards, I wondered if the same online rush to read, buy, and even try products online had severely impacted the card industry at Christmas.

Merry Christmas!

Unfortunately, it has, but not in any way to as great a degree as I suspected.

One of so many cool aspects of Christmas is shopping for cards and laughing at selections, sometimes with people you don't even know. But Christmas Card shopping is more and more an online process. The Toronto Sun reports that Canadians buy about 6 percent to 7 percent of their greeting cards online, and in America the purchase of traditional cards has slowed, but not by much.

But while the e-card market is not growing so fast that paper cards are a thing of the past, the number of makers of e-cards has grown. AsiaOne.com reports that where there were 80 companies making e-cards seven years ago, there are 250 today. I attribute that to the ease of online product-making that software allows. Special and inexpensive hosting platforms and graphic software programs form a great foundation for an online card-making business.

On top of that, we can add Facebook. Now, you can send Christmas e-cards over the popular social network. And with over 350 million people on Facebook, chances are you can cover all of your friends in one card-sending session.

If there's any other reason for a slight drop in traditional card-giving it's the bad mood this terrible economy has put the collective nation in. The Seattle Times reports this season's shaping up as a "ho-hum year" for cards in general. A number of retailers, including Walmart and Target, are seeing drops in card buying.

Still, I think the reason traditional Christmas Card buying has not fallen off as much as I thought it would have is that it's still a part of the Christmas shopping rush. Buying cards just goes with shopping at stores, so the fun, social aspect of Christmas Card shopping will be with us for years to come.

Thank God.