bodyType

customContents

entityId

entityUuid

articlePageQuery

filter

article

articleBaseAdvertisingInfoArticle

articleListArticle

articleSeoArticle

hooksArticleAcknowledgementGateOverlayArticle

hooksTrackPageViewArticle

hooksContentInterestArticle

articleLinkingDataContent

hooksAmpRedirectArticle

articleSchemaContent

liveArticle

advertZone

sentiment

contentLock

topics

types

sections

paywallTypes

createdDate

publishedDate

urlAlias

moreOnThisArticles

sponsorType

commentCount

authorLocations

authors

corrections

displaySlideShow

multimediaEmbed

printHeadline

seriesContainer

articleSpeeches

socialHeadline

headline

images

flag

firstTopic

glossary

flattenTypeIds

image

relatedLinks

relatedNewsletters

__typename

sponsor

pdfFiles

seriesReverseOrder

series

disableOffPlatformContent

published

updatedDate

summary

subHeadline

body

keywords

readingTime

customTimezone

liveContents

SCMP Reporter

It is Christmas time again, and unless you plan to send seasonal greetings to Reunion Island, you have already missed the last post.

Even then, today is the final posting day for airmail to Reunion, so you had better hurry.

If the postman keeps delivering mail from overseas to your mailbox and the guilt is setting in, there is still time - as long as your far-off relatives have e-mail.

Hallmark, the world's largest greetings-card business, has been making tentative steps into virtual greetings for several years.

At www.Hallmark.com, you can choose from a good range of animated, musical cards.

To make sure you do not forget again next year, you can set a card to send up to a year in advance.

The king of online greetings cards has always been Excite's Blue Mountain (www.bluemountain.com). Here you can get all of your seasonal electronic needs, including screen savers and printable Christmas decorations.

There is a Christmas card maker, where you can build a card with your own choice of music, graphics, animations and message. It also offers a selection of languages including Japanese, Korean and both traditional and simplified Chinese.

Rival Yahoo obviously had to get into the act, and while the leading search site has a great deal of cards to choose from at greetings.yahoo.com/browse/Holidays/Christmas, the range and quality does not compare with Excite.

Just because your cards are free, does not mean you cannot make a donation to charity.

Among the huge selection of seasonal cards at American Greetings (www.americangreetings.com) are several designed by celebrities, including Drew Barrymore and Cindy Crawford.

For each card sent, the site makes a donation to a children's charity in the United States.

These days, there are greetings cards in almost every language and country in the world.

A good destination for Chinese greetings is Hong Kong's own DragonCard (www.dragoncard.com).

Together with wallpaper and games, DragonCard offers some of the most cloying and cutesy cards around. But the animations are all stylish and professional, which is more than can be said for the average Hong Kong card site.

Why Not Creations (www.ynot.com) offers a range of personalisable Christmas cards, together with cards in Chinese and Vietnamese.

For the Philippines, the excellent Mabuhay Cards has a range of both humorous and pious Christmas greetings, many of them in Tagalog.

The site, at www.mabuhaycards.com, also offers other Philippine dialects and an entire section dedicated to lampooning the nation's troubled President Joseph Estrada.

Sugarqube (www.sugar3.com) carries dozens of Flash animated Christmas cards, all of which are safe and humorous, and designed with far more skill and style than the average cartoon-card site.

For more direct humour, Comedy Central, at www.comedycentral.com/greetings, is always a good destination. Though they seem to have the same cards every year, you cannot beat a Talking Poo to start the season on the right note.

And as the site boasts, 'A Comedy Central e-greeting pierces the crash [sic] commercialism of the season, to reach the true meaning of all these holidays, which is 'I don't like you enough to buy you a real gift'.'

In a magnanimous show of its affection, even the Hong Kong Government has got in on the e-greetings rush. The Government's Christmas greetings come in the form of two simple cards with images of a festive Central, accompanied by a choice of cheesy tunes.

For no obvious reason, the tunes are played with Macromedia's Flash player, and cannot be turned off, making this one of the more irritating cards of the year.

But by far the most annoying Christmas cards of the year come from Passthison.com. The cards themselves are not bad - in fact, some are almost amusing. But Passthison has clearly studied the porno book of marketing, because you cannot get away from your card without being assaulted by a series of pop-up windows. Viral marketing is coming to town.

Finally, remember that, at this time of year, it really is better to give than to receive. During the past couple of years, there have been increasing numbers of viruses which appear on first glance to be innocent Christmas greetings cards.

If you do not have up-to-date virus software installed, this would be as good a time as any to buy yourself an early Christmas present.

Graphic: card19gwz



Range ensures that all forms of greetings are covered, no matter the language or taste