My family banned greeting cards several years ago. We are funamentally opposed to dumping four bucks on an unoriginal piece of paper that will be chucked in the trash can momentarily (sorry, it’s true — I come from a long-line of obsessive thrower-awayers. I’m not even sure my parents kept my childhood photos). Instead, we give each other that $4 in cash and hand-write a personal letter.

Although recently, on the tail of the Green Take-Over, we started writing shorter letters. You know, to save on ink and paper, thus increasing the cash gift by about a quarter. This eventually morphed into three letters “HBD” (short for happy birthday) scrawled on the package of (unwrapped, of course) gifts — and an ecard waiting for me in my inbox, along with my 34,000 other e-mails of the day.

Someecards is my favorite sarcastic ecard site, “when you care enough to press send.” Aw. So thoughtful.

Here are a few of the cards I think are just tops.

And a great one for those mass birthday cards you get at work:

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