I’ve always been fascinated by the late 80s phenomenon of sending digital Christmas cards via floppy disk. It was a momentarily-modern take on a classic tradition. LGR covered it well here. The trend died almost as quickly as it was born, lasting only a few years, although it did seem to live on in the demo scene long into the 90s and beyond.
For years I’ve wanted to create one of these but I’ve never had the time or motivation. This year I decided that I’d embrace another modern phenomenon and see what I could vibe-code. The result is a simple animated Christmas card with a roaring fire and falling snow, along with a glowing Christmas tree. I grabbed a freely-available MIDI track for some background music as well. Admittedly Copilot (GPT-5) deserves most of the credit here, but I did make some significant modifications. The result took less than an hour to put together. Given more time I’d love to improve on it more. Maybe next year.
I intentionally chose to target .NET Framework 4.7 as it is pre-installed on Windows 10 and 11, meaning the resulting exe is only 21 KB. I’ve decided not to post the source code, mostly out of laziness. The exe is available below and is compiled for all architectures (it was developed on ARM64). It runs full-screen and can be stopped by pushing the Esc key.
Enjoy and Merry Christmas!
Download christmasgreetings2025.exe (21 KB)
