(This post is a few months too late to be relevant, but unfortunately I wasn’t on Lemmy three months ago. Fortunately, this post will be relevant again in nine months.)
On Vesak of this year, I spent most of the morning looking for a website where I could send an online card to someone for Vesak. It was a frustrating task.
First of all, let me say “Booo!” to the following websites, ALL of which have Rosh Hashanah cards (for Jews), Eid cards (for Muslims), and Diwali cards (for Hindus), and numerous cards for Christians, but no cards for Buddhists.
- Blue Mountain
- 123cards
- Greetings Island
- SmileBox
Please join me in writing to them and asking them to have some cards for Vesak next year.
Now, let me say “Yay!” to the government of India which has a wonderful selection of more than 80 beautiful “Buddha Purnima” (that’s what they call Vesak in India) cards on their e-cards website: https://egreetings.gov.in. (Yes, the government of India runs a greeting card website.) Unfortunately, it’s only for residents of India. You have to create a MyGov.in account, and it will ask you which state of India you live in.
The only useable Vesak cards I could find were on a website called Punchbowl (https://punchbowl.com). However, their selection isn’t great. (They had five designs, most of them rather generic.) And I found them a bit pricey. There is no option for sending free cards, or for paying per card. You have to sign up for a yearly membership. One option is to pay $35.88 USD for the year, but the cards you send will contain ads. If you don’t want the recipient of your card to see an ad, you have to pay $59.88 USD for the year. For me, that’s about $80 Canadian, which is too much to pay considering I’d likely only send a few cards a year. But if you send a lot of e-Cards every year, like for birthdays or whatever, that might work out a bit better.
So, all up, it’s not great news. Maybe we can hope for it to be better next year. And if you know of another website with Vesak cards, please let me know in the comments.