30 Years Of Digital Christmas

[ad_1] by BLACK ENTERPRISE Editors December 13, 2025

When sending laughably pixelated e-cards and posting seasonal greetings on message boards turned a vacation factor.

For so long as we’ve had the web, we’ve been utilizing it to have a good time the vacations. When you’re an elder millennial or Gen Xer, you most likely nonetheless keep in mind the early rituals properly: sending laughably pixelated e-cards, posting seasonal greetings on message boards, speeding residence to alter your AIM font to vacation colours after faculty. Maybe you painstakingly embellished your GeoCities web page with HTML snowfall and a looping MIDI soundtrack of “Carol of the Bells.” Or possibly you’re a Gen Z digital native who grew up on a weight-reduction plan of YouTube Christmas live shows and Elf Your self movies. Born squarely within the on-line period, you’ve by no means identified a vacation season that wasn’t celebrated, in a technique or one other, on a tool.

Over time, we’ve watched the web evolve from clunky and dorky to pleasant and, properly, in every single place. At this time, on-line vacation purchasing generates $282 billion within the U.S. and $1.2 trillion globally, based on Salesforce information. In 2024 alone, $229 billion of that on-line vacation commerce was influenced by AI instruments and advice engines, which exhibits simply how ingrained digital conduct is in how we have a good time.

Nonetheless distorted these primitive graphics look to us now, the web’s onset undoubtedly marked one thing big. It was the primary time individuals may share vacation moments with family members with out being in the identical room, and even on-line on the identical time. And because the internet matured, our digital vacation habits leveled up with it. Instantly, December wasn’t about ready for somebody to verify their e mail, however reasonably experiencing real-time festivities in digital areas. Livestreamed live shows changed these tinny MIDI recordsdata, synchronous group video chats took over from digital greeting playing cards, and folks started connecting throughout states, international locations and time zones.

To know how we acquired from e-cards and decked-out webpages to the best way we now use the net to orchestrate real-time digital celebrations, Decentraland dug into three a long time of web archives from cultural sources like Reddit, The Atlantic, ABC Information, Smithsonian Journal, and extra.

The timeline that emerges is oddly tender, unexpectedly humorous and immediately nostalgic to anybody who’s grown up alongside the online.

Nineties: Message boards, e-cards, and early on-line purchasing Message boards and boards

Within the early Nineties (and even late Eighties), the vacation season began seeping onto the net by means of message boards and textual content archive recordsdata. Websites like Textfiles.com now protect folders of seasonal poems, jokes, and parodies, hosted in a folder known as “Vacation Textfiles.” These items come from the broader bulletin board system (BBS) and early message-board tradition, the place individuals shared textual content recordsdata digitally lengthy earlier than the fashionable internet. Each had been precursors to the World Large Internet and as we speak’s social networks. Textual content file titles resembling “The Worm Earlier than Christmas” and “The Twelve Computerized Days of Christmas” present that festive digital sharing began sooner than most individuals keep in mind. These had been easy and asynchronous moments of connection, however they marked the primary shift towards celebrating collectively by means of screens.

Decentraland Early on-line greetings

E-cards got here subsequent. In December 1994, The Electrical Postcard, one of many first web-based greeting card websites, let customers select a picture, write a notice, and ship a hyperlink by e mail. It dealt with as much as 19,000 playing cards a day by Christmas 1995, and by spring 1996 had delivered greater than 1.7 million, reported The Atlantic. After that second, e-card platforms exploded in reputation, with BlueMountain.com (based in 1996) shortly turning into one of the visited web sites on the web. In October 1999, Excite, a number one search engine within the late Nineties, agreed to accumulate BlueMountain.com for about $780 million, reported The Guardian. With these developments, sending a vacation hi there ceased being sure by postal schedules or geography: You would attain somebody immediately, regardless of the place they had been.

Festive private internet pages

As extra individuals constructed private homepages on GeoCities or AOL Hometown, they began adorning their websites for the festive season with blinking lights, looping MIDI carols, drifting snowflakes, and novelty GIFs. The preservation challenge One Terabyte of Kilobyte Age wrote in a weblog: “Up till as we speak we found 55 pages within the GeoCities archive that had been embellished with softly falling DHTML snowflakes… adapting JavaScripts that GeoCities customers copy-pasted into their pages, digging up lacking snowflake GIFs and different flying objects…”—a reminder of how a lot care individuals poured into these small on-line corners.

Early on-line Christmas purchasing

By the late Nineties, individuals’s conduct on the net shifted from sharing to purchasing. Analysis printed in ScienceDirect exhibits shoppers spent about $1.5 billion on-line throughout the 1998 Christmas season. The following 12 months, spending jumped from $5 to $6 billion. Ernst & Younger’s 1998 retail survey confirmed that the share of consumers who did not less than 10% of their vacation purchasing on-line was anticipated to virtually triple in only one season. Shopping for presents on Amazon or eBay was now not an odd experiment, however reasonably a standard a part of December.

Decentraland Early 2000s: Digital worlds, Flash, and festive SMS Vacation occasions in digital worlds

By the early 2000s, vacation traditions had already discovered their approach into on-line worlds. Video games like RuneScape launched festive moments that gamers may expertise collectively, resembling its 2001 Christmas occasion, the place Christmas crackers had been scattered throughout the map. Across the identical time, Habbo Lodge showcased seasonal furnishings and embellished social rooms, turning the digital lodge right into a sort of digital December hangout. Membership Penguin’s first Christmas Celebration launched in 2005 and provided gamers Santa hats, scarves, and totally themed places from the Evening Membership to the Ice Rink. This confirmed that there was an urge for food for celebrating the vacations collectively on-line, even inside easy digital areas, lengthy earlier than digital live shows and in-game festivals took off.

Flash e-cards and quirky interactive web sites

Vacation expression took on a brand new type with the arrival of Adobe Flash, a software program that made it simpler to create animated and interactive webpages. Platforms like JibJab and Hallmark’s on-line greeting instruments let individuals star in their very own animated playing cards. Then got here Elf Your self in December 2006, a marketing campaign by OfficeMax that allow customers flip their faces into dancing elves. Elf Your self exploded virtually instantly with greater than 36 million visits and 11 million elves created in its first 5 weeks, reported MediaPost. These had been early hints of the web’s style for viral seasonal spectacle that’s interactive, customizable, and made to be shared.

Decentraland YouTube enters the chat The launch of YouTube in 2005 added one thing new to the season: user-generated vacation movies. From selfmade gentle exhibits synced to music, to comedic Christmas sketches, to early vlogs capturing household traditions, a brand new channel for expression had been unleashed. One of many earliest viral examples was Ohio engineer Carson Williams’ Christmas gentle show set to a soundtrack by the Trans-Siberian Orchestra, which was recorded in 2004 and circulated on-line in 2005. YouTube made the vacation season really feel extra public as a result of a single individual’s festive video may take off and turn out to be a part of everybody’s December.

Vacation textual content messaging peaks As cellphones turned extra frequent within the early 2000s, vacation greetings shifted once more. The very first textual content message, despatched on Dec. 3, 1992, learn “Merry Christmas,” nevertheless it wasn’t till the mid-noughties that SMS turned a defining December behaviour. By 2005, O2 reported that 65 million texts had been despatched by means of its community on Christmas Day alone, based on the Each day Telegraph through ZDNET. The phenomenon took off worldwide. A 12 months later, The Guardian famous that greater than 205 million messages had been despatched on Christmas Day throughout the U.Okay. This new pattern was one other step within the transfer from considerate however delayed communication to one thing extra rapid—nonetheless asynchronous, however quicker and extra informal than something that got here earlier than it.

Decentraland Prompt social media updates

On the identical time, social media started to reshape how individuals shared vacation information. The as soon as rigorously crafted Christmas letter, a staple of household communication for many years, struggled to compete with Fb’s real-time updates. By 2010, Christian Science Monitor was asking whether or not Fb would possibly spell the tip of the annual letter, complaining that what was once “a thick slice of Christmas stollen” by a protracted, reflective recap had been decreased to “crumbs” scattered throughout day by day posts. That very same 12 months, the U.S. Postal Service anticipated a seasonal drop in greeting playing cards and letters, from 3 billion to 2.9 billion between Thanksgiving and Christmas. As an alternative of saving tales for a single second, individuals had been now broadcasting their December in small, fixed fragments, furthering the shift towards vacation life lived on-line.

Digital gifting begins

As vacation purchasing moved on-line, reward giving itself began to shift from bodily objects to digital ones. Apple’s launch of the iTunes Reward Card in 2003 was an early sign of this alteration. A product designer’s retrospective on Dribbble later described the primary card as “a daring foray into uncharted territory,” noting the way it helped spark a wider retail shift. Reward playing cards shortly turned a common fixture. It marked the start of a brand new sort of vacation trade, one formed much less by objects and extra by entry.

Late 2000s to early 2010s: Social media, streaming, and digital gifting Music streaming and vacation soundtracks

Listening habits modified too. Knowledge from Final.fm exhibits that as early as 2005, Christmas playlists started spiking in November. By the 2010s, streaming platforms had reworked this sample solely. Spotify reported that listening-session lengths climb by about 10% from October by means of January, with ladies twice as probably as males to stream seasonal music. After all, music subscription reward playing cards helped with this transition to streaming.

Sharing moments on social media

When smartphones arrived in 2007, capturing and sharing a vacation second turned on the spot. Individuals who as soon as stored household moments principally personal had been instantly posting pictures and movies on Fb, MySpace, YouTube, and later Instagram. What used to remain in a photograph album at residence was now out within the open, and vacation rituals turned much more seen than earlier than to prolonged household, buddies and wider on-line audiences.

newer information, you may see how that pattern has caught. The Solar reported in 2023 that the common smartphone consumer takes about 69 pictures and movies over the festive interval and shares greater than a 3rd of them on social media. The household photograph album morphed right into a consistently updating feed.

Decentraland Group chat apps turned a part of this transition too. WhatsApp (launched 2009) and iMessage (launched 2011) turned vacation coordination into an ongoing back-and-forth: sharing greetings, planning, sending pictures, and checking in with household throughout time zones. Pew Analysis famous that messaging apps overtook SMS as a major methodology of communication for a lot of youthful and worldwide households by the mid-2010s, serving to to make interactions extra synchronous and conversational.

Social media additionally modified our vacation aesthetics. Pinterest was shaped in 2010 and offered individuals with “boards” to curate their supreme decor, menus and reward concepts. Beforehand inspiration was drawn from journal spreads and store home windows, however now individuals may pin concepts they discovered on-line and create temper boards. Early Pinterest was full of easy inspiration, together with printable Christmas labels and budget-friendly centrepieces made out of glass bowls and ornaments. The platform’s personal analysis from 2019 exhibits that individuals begin planning for the vacation season as early as June and July, with searches for “Christmas baking,” “Christmas wishlist” and “Christmas decor concepts.”

2010s: Influencers, livestreaming, and world vacation tradition Each day vacation movies and influencer shaping

By the 2010s, the vacation season had turn out to be one thing of a digital season in its personal proper. One of many clearest examples was Vlogmas, launched in 2011 by creator Ingrid Nilsen, who posted a video (half diary, half efficiency) each day from Dec. 1 by means of Christmas. Inside a couple of years, different content material creators joined in and Vlogmas turned a seasonal staple. A 2017 Refinery29 characteristic reported that looking “Vlogmas 2012” on YouTube introduced up roughly 898,000 outcomes, whereas “Vlogmas 2016” returned over 2 million.

Livestreaming for philanthropy

As soon as individuals noticed how livestreaming may pull communities collectively in actual time, they started utilizing it for charitable functions. Platforms like Twitch started internet hosting seasonal charity campaigns, such because the Collectively For Good initiative, which inspired communities to collect round fundraising streams all through December. Across the identical time, teams like Yogscast started their annual vacation livestreams, beginning in 2011 and elevating tens of millions through the years. These occasions created a brand new sort of shared December ritual—half leisure, half neighborhood gathering—the place individuals may present up collectively in actual time, even when they had been watching from totally different corners of the world.

Decentraland Globalization of vacation rituals

Because the 2010s progressed, the web carried vacation traditions far past their unique borders. Iceland’s Jólabókaflóð, the annual Christmas e book flood, discovered a worldwide viewers after going viral, prompting individuals properly outdoors Iceland to undertake the ritual of gifting books and spending Christmas Eve studying, reported Nation Dwelling. In the meantime, figures like Krampus moved from regional folklore into digital storytelling, meme tradition, and on-line fandoms. Vice wrote about how shortly the web propelled this once-local character into world recognition. Folks began sharing and choosing up one another’s vacation traditions, and these unfold throughout platforms quickly.

Vacation occasions in massively multiplayer on-line video games

All through the 2010s, vacation traditions discovered a deeper foothold in on-line video games. Main MMOs started treating December as an annual occasion season and providing winter festivals in titles like World of Warcraft, Guild Wars 2, Remaining Fantasy XIV, and New World, reported MMORG, a publication masking on-line multiplayer video games. These occasions introduced limited-time quests, beauty rewards, and small celebratory actions that gamers returned to 12 months after 12 months. These game-wide festivities confirmed how teams may collect on the identical second, inside the identical digital house, to participate in seasonal occasions collectively.

2020 to 2021: The hybrid vacation years Zoom holidays

The pandemic rewired vacation rituals virtually in a single day. With journey restricted and gatherings restricted, individuals blended bodily and digital traditions in ways in which would have appeared unlikely a 12 months earlier. In late 2020, Zoom briefly eliminated its 40-minute restrict on free requires Christmas and New 12 months’s, reported The Guardian, permitting households to remain linked with out interruption. What had as soon as been a novelty was pressured to turn out to be a seasonal norm.

Decentraland Reddit secret Santa

Digital communities responded in their very own methods too. Reddit’s Secret Santa trade, described by The Unbiased because the web’s longest-running Christmas custom, drew 111,362 individuals throughout 140 international locations in 2020. Even in isolation, individuals had been in search of shared rituals, collective participation, and a way of being a part of one thing bigger than their very own residing rooms.

Livestreaming

Livestreaming wasn’t new in 2020, however the pandemic pushed it into the centre of the vacation season in a approach that hadn’t occurred earlier than. What was as soon as a distinct segment instrument for avid gamers instantly turned a bridge for vacation traditions that couldn’t occur in individual. Fb reported greater than 55 million reside broadcasts throughout Fb and Instagram globally on New 12 months’s Eve. It was a option to expertise the vacation synchronously, even when individuals had been bodily aside.

Decentraland Early to mid 2020s: TikTok, social video games and digital worlds TikTok tendencies and purchasing

By the late 2010s and into the early 2020s, TikTok turned one of many strongest engines of vacation tradition. The hashtag #christmas reached greater than 21.6 billion views, based on NestScale, turning the platform right into a sort of seasonal pulse level. Vacation rituals on TikTok aren’t fastened moments a lot as ongoing microperformances: tree-decorating hacks, outfit reveals, comedic household skits, and countdown clips that floor quickly on the ‘For You’ feed.

Because the platform grew, it additionally turned a serious hub for vacation purchasing. Current information from Resourcera exhibits that 58% of TikTok customers make purchases straight by means of the app, and November is persistently considered one of its highest-spending months with TikTok Store producing over $1.29 billion that month in 2024, suggesting that individuals are looking for purchasing presents in addition to vacation leisure and inspiration.

Holidays in social video games and digital worlds

Within the early 2020s, video games acquired much more social. Gamers of Animal Crossing: New Horizons, for example, used their in-game islands to recreate birthdays, weddings, and vacation gatherings reported GamesRadar. Seasonal occasions like Toy Day or Winterfest turned the sport world right into a festive venue the place buddies may go to one another and have a good time collectively.

These behaviors set the stage for extra immersive synchronous experiences. Platforms resembling Decentraland, Horizon Worlds and The Sandbox started internet hosting vacation live shows, themed trails, avatar trend contests, and community-made festive builds. The straightforward seasonal moments from the 2000s had expanded into large immersive celebrations.

Decentraland For instance, Christmas in Decentraland 2019 comprised Festive Wearables, together with an “8 Bit Christmas Sweater” and “Christmas Cyberpunk Eyewear,” wrote Decentraland Fandom. By 2021, gamers had been teaming up for a multiplayer Santa-versus-Krampus snowball combat, which returned once more in 2022. That very same winter additionally noticed the arrival of Bing Crosby’s Winter Wonderland, a construct that includes mini-games, music moments, and a themed sweater store. In 2023, the season seemed extra like a patchwork of on-line gatherings: Christmas Eve live shows, branded vacation giveaways, new venue openings, and small themed video games constructed by totally different teams.

At this time: Video calls, shared digital areas, and AI helpers Video calls proceed to be a part of vacation rituals

With extra households residing throughout borders than ever—an estimated 304 million individuals reside outdoors their nation of start in 2024, based on the Migration Coverage Institute, a analysis group targeted on world migration information—staying shut in December typically will depend on screens as a lot as journey. Even after the surge of pandemic use, surveys present that individuals proceed to make use of video requires household gatherings and celebrations throughout time zones.

Digital worlds as shared areas

As video calls turned the default option to keep linked, digital worlds now supply individuals a way of place, letting buddies and households meet, discover, and have a good time collectively in actual time through holiday-themed actions resembling interactive advent-style calendars.

Decentraland On-line workshops and shared creativity

Seasonal creativity additionally continues on-line. Platforms like Eventbrite nonetheless host digital wreath-making courses, candle workshops, and vacation craft classes: small, synchronous gatherings that carry individuals collectively regardless of bodily distance. These workshops are the fashionable counterpart to neighborhood halls and kitchens, however with a broader attain and decrease obstacles to entry.

AI vacation playing cards and purchasing

AI has slipped unsurprisingly into the vacation season. A 2024 piece in Bloomberg described how individuals had been utilizing AI instruments so as to add “a bit of magic—however not an excessive amount of” to their household playing cards, describing it as a “zero guilt” option to tidy up pictures earlier than sending them out. Tom’s Information, a well-liked tech overview and how-to web site, echoed this sentiment extra not too long ago in a characteristic about making AI-generated playing cards by means of Nano Banana, displaying how accessible these instruments have turn out to be for anybody wanting one thing private however straightforward.

AI-powered vacation purchasing

AI is turning into woven into how individuals store throughout the holidays. Based on a Reuters report, consumers used AI-powered chatbot companies 42% greater than the earlier season, counting on conversational instruments to seek out presents, evaluate merchandise, and navigate returns. Salesforce’s information exhibits that this shift performed a significant function in influencing shopping for selections all through the 2024 vacation interval.

If you look again on 30 years of celebrating holidays on-line, you may see that individuals have at all times used no matter instruments they'd obtainable to remain linked after they couldn’t be in the identical place. What began with message boards and e-cards grew into shared streams, group chats, and digital areas the place individuals collect in actual time, however the intention didn’t change. As our lives stretch throughout cities and time zones, these shared digital areas really feel much less like a novelty and extra like a pure extension of how we already have a good time. They provide one other option to present up for the individuals we care about when distance will get in the best way.