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If you’ve taken any time to scan on the internet, you’ll already know that there are hundreds of sites offering printable Christmas cards for printing out. But where’s the creativity? Where’s the personal touch, other than the signature inside? If we’re going to send people cards expressing our goodwill this season, we should do it with the appropriate thought, and spend a little time doing it.

So, assuming that you want to make Christmas cards yourself, and that you’ve not caved in yet and just bought five-thousand generic cards with a robin on the front. The first thing we should explore is that, in a secular society, Christmas means different a different thing to different people. This is good for us. We can expand hugely upon the usual predictable symbols and images, which have, we should admit, somewhat lost their original meaning. We’ll hang on to this thought as we talk about designs. Which simply require your creativity and a computer and printer.

With our new blank canvas, we can think about what’s going to go on our card. Think ‘Christmas season’, and not traditional Christmas. What things go with Christmas that we particularly love, that we know our friends and family enjoy too? A great idea is to make collages – describe your favourite winter walk, your ideal setting, where the empty space is the undisturbed snow, and you illuminate the features with cut-outs from magazines and newspapers. For a uniform texture, scan this into your computer, turn the image fully black-and-white, and make quality print-outs.

One quite original idea (I’m sure it’s been done before) is to give someone a wintry treasure hunt. To do this, print out the successive clues to be hidden, each as a mini card in itself, leading to the eventual discovery of your gift, or even just the card itself. This presumes you are regularly in this person’s home; you’re unlikely to be thanked for planting these clues uninvited.

Think back to previous Christmas periods – with family and close friends, you’ll no doubt have endless folders of photos from over the years. How about making a photo-board from your existing pictures with a scanner and some simple image editing software to cut out the pieces digitally, meaning you can save the precious originals? Once you’ve layered several memorable shots, you can add your seasonal message and print your cards out to address a particular area of the photoboard to a particular relative.

Whatever choice you make, be original, and try to take a twist on the normal way of doing things. Use good quality paper and colour printer to make your design look the part. Plain print-out Christmas cards are just as dull as their cheap, shop-bought cousins. Change this with a little thought, and you’ll find the process of ‘doing your Christmas cards’ much more enjoyable for yourself too.