Holiday Facebook applications are now so popular with users that they’re squeezing out our usual mix of social games, quizzes, and generally-themed gift-giving apps on our weekly up-and-comers list on AppData. To be clear, this list only looks at applications that grew the most and ended the past week with between 100,000 and 1 million monthly active users. Social games still dominate, overall.

The point of looking at this segment of AppData is that we can see smaller apps that getting popular fast; given that we’re just finishing the first week in December, we expect holiday apps to continue growing fast over the next few weeks, as has happened in past years.

	Name	MAU	Gain	Gain, %
1.	Christmas Cards!	594,971	+537,388	+90.32
2.	Christmas goodies	492,282	+424,249	+86.18
3.	@Smiles	582,893	+422,412	+72.47
4.	Ultimate Slot Machines	888,711	+404,513	+45.52
5.	Chase Community Giving	912,058	+354,404	+38.86
6.	Happy Thanksgiving!	732,831	+351,052	+47.90
7.	Holiday Drinks	403,143	+326,720	+81.04
8.	Christmas Kisses	492,440	+316,235	+64.22
9.	Translations	315,674	+313,758	+99.39
10.	Poker Rivals	256,833	+254,508	+99.09
11.	Find My Lover	197,308	+180,541	+91.50
12.	A Special Bouquet Greeting!	953,892	+179,273	+18.79
13.	Ask a Friend	694,366	+171,798	+24.74
14.	Santa Yourself	268,929	+166,699	+61.99
15.	ScroogeOmeter	232,954	+162,329	+69.68
16.	PayPal WishList	307,329	+160,109	+52.10
17.	Status History	836,706	+159,603	+19.08
18.	BigPrize Giveaways	614,030	+159,021	+25.90
19.	What Type Of Girl Are you?	812,954	+138,876	+17.08
20.	Youtopia	193,137	+134,537	+69.66

At the top we have Christmas Cards!, which, as the name suggests, lets you send virtual Christmas cards to your Facebook friends (if you send enough gifts, you can “Unlock the animated sparkly ones!”). People like this sort of thing, as the app grew 537,000 this past week, most of its 595,000 monthly actives. And, if the simple interface looks very familiar, that’s because this app was created with LOLapps’ Gift Creator app.

‘Tis the season for using Gift Creator to make a Christmas app, apparently, because that’s what second-place Christmas goodies did as well. It grew 424,000 of its 492,000 monthly actives last week.

Other Holiday-themed (and simple) apps on this week’s list include: Happy Thanksgiving! (why did this app keep growing after Thanksgiving?), Holiday Drinks, Christmas Kisses, Santa Yourself and ScroogeOmeter.

A few games do show, up though, notably 6 Wave’s Ultimate Slot Machines, Playfish’s new poker game, Poker Rivals, and mini Sim City-style game Youtopia.

There are quite a few other notable apps here, too, like the Chase Community Giving app. Made by Context Optional, Chase is giving away $5 million to various charities and wants you and your Facebook friends to use the app to vote on which ones deserve the money.

Another intriguing app is PayPal WishList. Made by eBay-owned Paypal itself and not another developer (apparently), the app gives you $1 for joining it then asks you to create a wish list and share it with friends, then pays you $1 for every friend who adds the app. And, this is only available to Facebook users in a range of Asian countries.