Save a Tree - Send an eCard

screencapture from mypunchbowl.com

I used to write those long, Christmas letters to send to relations and friends. I don’t know if it’s a function of age or something else but as the years went by, those letters seemed to be getting out later and later every year.

One year I’ve decided that we won’t send those anymore. Saving a tree would be the best excuse among the several that I did come up with. So one year we did an e-greeting on a mini-disc, another year we did photos in PowerPoint, another year via email -- just to tell friends we're thinking about them and we're fine. 2008 is perhaps the year of the e-cards.

The e-card studio of mypunchbowl.com offers hundreds of beautiful, free e-cards that you can customized with colors, fonts, or images of your choice. The studio provides a simple way to email your friends or even share your e-card on Facebook or Twitter. The company is reportedly striving for an electronic equivalent to the classier (but more expensive) sort of card that you might find in a real stationary store. The service makes use of an impressive card editor which features an intuitive tool along with a textured “virtual paper.” The designs are elegant and not at all tacky. Service is free but requires registration. Mypunchbowl is in the same line of business as evite.com which has its own holiday e-cards in addition to electronic invitations, but the e-cards from the mypunchbowl are just much, much nicer. Another option is called www.smilebox, but this one requires that you download an application in your computer before you can start using their service. So I decided to skip it; too many "live" things residing in my computer already.

When you care enough to hit send That's the motto of someecards.com. If you want irreverent e-cards without the the warm fuzzies, the only place to go is www.somecards.com, number 36 in Time Mag's 50 Best Websites of 2008. One of the top five sent says: “When work feels overwhelming, remember that you’re going to die,” the rest of that most-popular group are a tad too much for this blog. Here's the blurb in its website:

Someecards.com is possibly to probably the best site on the Web for free, funny ecards. We have greeting cards for every occasion - from important to utterly pointless. Send greetings for apology, birthday, baby, breakup, congratulations, encouragement, farewell, flirting, friendship, get well, sympathy, thanks, thinking of you, wedding, workplace, and holidays like Mother's Day, Father's Day, Valentine's Day, Thanksgiving, and Christmas. We suggest you e-mail them to friends, family, coworkers, loved ones, liked ones, and anyone else with fingers.

No registration required, and you can cc: your own email for every e-card you send. Just note that someecards is not intended for use by people under 18 years of age. Here's one of the tamer ones:

screencapture from someecards.com

Just a quick note if you are with State. E-cards may still fall under the unacceptable category of materials received in your government email account (clogs up the system and all that) so you might think about these e-cards for private email accounts.