Amanda, J’s niece, has a daughter who’s just turned three.

Old enough to appreciate that she’s had a birthday so we sent her a card (we also have a glove puppet for her but we were totally disorganised, so we ended up ordering one of these print on demand and send express cards at the last minute – the glove puppet will have to wait until Christmas), reckoning that she’d appreciate one of her favourite cartoon characters.

Well she did. Now in the old days her mum would have helped her send a thank you note – say a set of scribbled orange blobs claiming to be a picture of something, and J would have stuck it fondly on the fridge.

Well, that’s so last century. We got a text message with emoticons. Given she’s three I’m guessing her mum might have helped her a little.

Which was nice. Provoked the same fond reaction, even though it didn’t end up on the fridge.

But that actually opens up a bigger question now that the card sending season is coming – even if you send people physical cards (albeit ordered from said print on demand  people), what do you do about the ecards, text messages and so on you get in response?

You could print them out, but that seems a bit boring. I have an alternative idea -I’ve got one of these cheap $10 media display units, so I’ll convert them all to jpegs, save them to a USB, and autoplay them on the kitchen tv. I could even be a bit kitsch and add some festive music.

Yes, it’s a bit naff, but at least it’s fun …