The three astronauts living aboard the International Space Station (ISS) are a long way from home this holiday season, but are apparently awash in digital cheer thanks to some electronic Christmas cards from the people of Earth.

Expedition 16 commander Peggy Whitson and flight engineers Dan Tani and Yuri Malenchenko have received more than 6,000 electronic cards bearing good wishes from around the globe via a free NASA portal. You can too by clicking here.

“If those greetings had been sent by Christmas cards, the postal sacks would have weighed about 200 pounds,” the agency said Friday. “Just the postage would have cost more than $1,500.”

The Expedition 16 astronauts are only the latest space crew to spend the holiday season in orbit.

According to NASA’s records, the first astronauts to spend Christmas in space were the crew of Apollo 8 in 1968, who beamed a special message back to Earth during their historic first flight around the moon.

NASA’s next batch of Christmas spaceflyers flew in 1973 during the fourth Skylab mission. The astronauts assembled an ad-hoc Christmas tree out of food cans to mark the holiday.

NASA’s first holiday astronaut of the space shuttle era was John Blaha, who spread yuletide cheer aboard Russia’s Space Station Mir in 1996. Shuttle astronauts marked the holiday in 1999 during the STS-103 mission to the Hubble Space Telescope, to date the only orbiter mission to spend Christmas in space.

The first ISS astronauts began spending the holidays in orbit in 2000 during Expedition 1. Three years later, the Expedition 6 crew would slather red and white frosting over Twinkies as an impromptu Christmas cake.

Click here to learn more about the history of Christmas in space.

Click here to send your own message to the Expedition 16 crew aboard the space station and view the astronaut’s holiday video.

For a sample of some of the thousands of messages already received by the station crew, click here.