It has become a tradition for us to make our own Christmas cards to send to family and close friends, and this year was the third offering. We decided on our faces being superimposed on three Christmas-tree decorations, along with a more fitting rewritten chorus of Wham’s “Last Christmas”.

The whole process, excluding the trip to the shops to buy gold envelopes (that’s the colour, not the precious metal), took a fair few hours to complete, and is always worth the effort.

My mum rang today to wish us well, but failed to mention the card which she should have received. When I brought it up she said, with an almost affronted tone, that it wasn’t really a card. I was agog, equally affronted and slightly angry at Mum’s dismissal of our art (and it was art). I can understand that it didn’t have the traditional feel of a Chrimbo card; I can also appreciate that the humour of the accompanying verse was lost on her, not being an 80s chick; I can even accept that the lack of ‘love from’ signature may have made it feel impersonal. What irks me is that she could not see past these minor deviances, and value the sentiment of a computer home-made card.

Oh, well, it looks like we’ll be sending the Disney cards (a bunch of which she once offloaded on us a few years ago) from now on.