People have mixed views on getting e-cards at Christmas – some rejoice in the animations and wit, and some associate them with an abrogation of tradition. It’s maybe not a crucial question for science, but it may be a crucial one for your social life – who would appreciate you sending them an e-card this Christmas, and who would like the traditional paper variety? If this is an issue you spend any time thinking about, then you may be interested to know there are predictors of Christmas card preferences1, including people’s levels of ecological awareness2,3, their profession2, and their needs for convenience2,4.

This card-preference literature could be viewed within a broader spectrum of research into predictors of Christmas behaviours3, such as amounts spent on gifts5, and views on receiving gift-cards6. Many of these economically-motivated studies involve the Big-5 personality traits as predictors5,6. An advantage of knowing about Big-5 traits is that, even if you don’t know whether the person has any of the e-card predictors, you may know about their personality, and can use that knowledge to predict their e-card opinions. Of course, you could just get into the spirit of Christmas and guess! However, if you want to try to make a psychologically well-informed card selection, what does the research say about Big-5 personality and the predictors of Christmas card preferences?

Let’s place this card-giving business in context. Estimates suggest that about 1 billion Christmas cards are sent annually in the UK2,7, and about 1.5 billion in the US. Somewhat surprisingly, these figures suggest people in the UK send about three times the number of cards as those in the US, per head of population. The figures could be wrong, but such ballpark estimates suggest a lot of cards are sent at Christmas. Of those cards in the UK, about 500 million are e-cards, which represents a sizable portion of the market2. The percentage of people in the UK who have sent an e-card has increased by about 30% since 2023 (just under 50% in 2023, to just over two-thirds in 2025)2. So, this is no longer a niche issue – but a seasonal dilemma!

Focusing on paper cards, around 30,000 tons of them end up in the bin each year.7 As one tree produces around 3,000 cards, this means we are putting about 33 million trees in the bin7. That’s about 1,000 square miles of trees in the rubbish – an area of about three times the size of New York City, and about twice the size of London. This brings us to the........

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