If recent trends are any indication, stamped seasons greetings could soon become a thing of Christmas Past. 

According to Hallmark, one of the largest greeting card companies in the world, Americans mailed—or at least purchased—600 million fewer Christmas cards in 2014 than in 2004, a 30 percent decrease. Card companies in the U.K. report similar statistics. 

Industry experts blame the drop on a variety of factors, from environmental concerns, print-on-demand technology, prohibitive postage costs, and even digital age ignorance of snail mail fundamentals. 

“We had some 14-year-olds in for work experience this week and none of them knew how to address an envelope properly,” Dame Hilary Blume, who heads Britain’s Charities Advisory Trust’s Card Aid campaign, which annually counts on Christmas card sales to benefit various charities, told The Guardian last December for a bluntly ominous article headlined “Is 2014 the year the Christmas card died?”

Those continuing the more than 150-year-old tradition also appear to becoming more selective regarding their list of recipients, at least when it comes to traditional, store-bought cards. 

“We find that people tend to buy those for close family members and for people they want to express appreciation to, like teachers and care givers,” Kristi Ernsting, a Hallmark spokeswoman, told MarketWatch in 2014.

But the main suspect in the down tick seems to be social media, which at least one Christmas card connoisseur believes “has pretty much eliminated the need for them” as a means of keeping in touch with old friends and distant relatives.

For the greeting card industry, which over the past decade has shrunk at a rate of 5 percent a year, those are tidings of discomfort and concern.

“The industry is declining,” market research analyst Sarah Turk told NPR, “and from 2015 to 2020 we expect it to continue this downward trend.”