Holiday applications continue to grow through holiday season, and so do games and foreign-language applications on this week’s list of the top 20 emerging Facebook applications.

Remember that this is a listing of apps that have an audience of 100,000 to 1 million monthly active users. The numbers used were for the week ending Dec. 17th.

Four holiday apps appear on this weeks list with Christmas Greetings raising 85 percent for first place. Behind it, Ponzi, Inc. a tycoon-game made by Challenge Games, has managed to snag second place. Ponzi has been building speed for a few weeks now, since its release in mid-November, so we expect it to move beyond this list shortly.

	Name	MAU	Gain	Gain, %
1.	Christmas Greetings	899,204	+760,022	+84.52
2.	Ponzi, Inc.	726,421	+354,187	+48.76
3.	Poker Rivals	900,181	+331,733	+36.85
4.	Happy Hanukkah!	384,784	+306,613	+79.68
5.	funbook 非玩不可	313,386	+271,757	+86.72
6.	Top Fish	556,464	+231,588	+41.62
7.	Youtopia	509,619	+200,721	+39.39
8.	Bubble Popp	363,126	+189,960	+52.31
9.	PayPal WishList	575,477	+158,466	+27.54
10.	快打之王	157,432	+154,376	+98.06
11.	COLLAPSE!	564,991	+151,462	+26.81
12.	Ma Fiche	685,289	+134,691	+19.65
13.	Christmas Animations	348,157	+132,318	+38.01
14.	Kingdoms of Camelot	259,938	+124,638	+47.95
15.	ScroogeOmeter	480,395	+122,728	+25.55
16.	Pro League Basketball	608,219	+119,615	+19.67
17.	Happy Habitat	279,742	+115,552	+41.31
18.	Say Merry Christmas	156,786	+112,644	+71.85
19.	Find My Lover	489,920	+110,953	+22.65
20.	eStats pro	331,238	+107,832	+32.5

Poker Rivals is another month-old app to watch. It is now a routine performer on the up and coming list, and comes in third this week with 332,000 new players or roughly 37 percent of its audience.

Happy Hanukkah! is the most interesting success story this week as the app is the only non-Christmas app to break any of our top 20′s this season. The only Hanukkah-themed app to crack the top 20, the app has seen slow build leading up to this weeks numbers. 290,000 people are using the app this week compared to last. Roughly 80 percent of is audience appeared in the last six days.

Two of the fastest-rising apps this week were Chinese-language titles. One, funbook 非玩不可, has grown 87 percent since its release on December 8 for a monthly active user base of 313,386. The Chinese language niche is interesting due to China’s ban of Facebook — these apps are used by people around Asia and the rest of the world. 快打之王, in eleventh place, is a sort of role-playing game and was released this month along with Funbook. It also grew 98 percent in its first week after being released on Dec. 5th, the largest percent increase this week.

Interestingly, PayPal WishList has seen a large boost this year. The seasonal app has seen interest from people wanting to share their holiday wish list this year, however it may also be from PayPal’s contest for users to share their list for the chance to receive $100. The more friends they share it with, the more chances to win. This is a strategy that is becoming very popular with companies and their Facebook pages.

Finally, holiday apps Christmas Animations, thirteenth, and Say Merry Christmas, eighteenth, show up this week. So does eStats pro, which has been around since September 2008. Meanwhile, an app to watch — due to its suggestive nature — is Find My Lover, nineteenth, which matches friends on your account to who would be good to hook up with.