In our family the period immediately before Christmas Day is taken up with the annual ritual of home-made Christmas cards.

This tradition started when Crawf 1 appeared and has developed over the years as successive Crawfs have appeared and grown. Originally simple coloured drawings with some sort of family theme linked not always coherently to Christmas – the Pokemon phase lasted rather longer than it should have done – the artwork has become steadily more sophisticated.

First smart art paper and glitter pens, then additions of family photographs cut out and pasted, and now the wonders of digital camera technology. And as the junior Crawfs have got older, flashes of biting satire and even droll wit have appeared, not to mention art school design themes.

This year saw Santa crashing down into our daughter’s bathroom through our leaky roof, some pointed references to supposed teenage-style crushes, and (bizarrely) two independent creations featuring the dog being cooked served for Christmas Dinner with an apple in its mouth.

This year’s innovation: FaceGoo, an iPhone app which allows you to stretch photographs into grotesque contortions (eg a normal looking mother-in-law deftly transformed into the witch from Snow White) and save the results. The dog scarcely recognised itself.

Anyway, with each Christmas generating well over ten family cards of different shapes and sizes, it is a bigger and bigger job every year just to hang them all up. They are our main treasured family archive.

All of which is just to say that there comes a point when the blogging wheels stop turning for a few days as waves of relatives and mince pies storm and finally overwhelm the battlements.

And we all feel much the better for it.