Personalised Family Christmas Cards: Names, First Christmases and Pets

A Christmas card with a name on the front tends to get kept. It goes on the mantelpiece, it stays up past New Year, and every so often it ends up in a memory box rather than the recycling. That is the difference between a card someone reads once and a card someone hangs on to.

We covered the funny half of our Christmas card range in our guide to the novelty designs. This one is for the other half. These are the cards you send to family: the one with everybody's names on it, the first-Christmas designs for a new baby, the couple cards and the pet ones. Every card here is £3.95, personalised before we print it, and made by the two of us in Hessle.

The signpost card, for a whole household

If you want everyone included on one card, start with the Custom Signpost Family Name Christmas Greetings Card. The design is a snowy wooden signpost with a name on each arm, and it holds up to twelve of them.

There are four things to fill in when you order, and they are all optional text fields rather than a fixed template. You pick how many names you want from a 1 to 12 list, then give us the family name, then the names themselves, then the quote wording.

That last field is the one people skim past. It is where you set the line that runs with the signpost, so you can keep it simple or write something only your family would understand. It costs nothing extra and it is the bit that makes the card yours rather than ours.

Twelve names covers most households with room spare. It works for grandparents sending one card to the whole lot, and it works just as well sent to another family as a card about them.

A baby's first Christmas

First-Christmas cards outlive every other card in the range, which is exactly why they are worth ordering with the name on rather than left blank. There is a baby boy's design and a baby girl's design, and the name is the only personalisation on either.

It is worth saying that the name field is optional on these, as it is on most of the range. A blank one is still a perfectly good card. With the name printed on the front, it stops being a card and starts being a dated keepsake, and that is the version people put away.

If it is a bigger first-Christmas present you are after, the baby collection is the better place to look for the framed side of it. The card and a print together is a very common pairing at this time of year.

Two names on one card

Snow Couple and Penguin Couple are the designs built for sending to two people at once, which quietly solves the yearly question of whose name goes first.

The front takes one line of text, so both names go on together. They suit newly-married couples, a first Christmas in a new house, and the friends you would otherwise send something generic to.

For the cat household, and the cow one

Purry Christmas and Christmas Cow are the two pun designs we left out of the novelty guide, because neither is really a joke card. They are the ones you send to the person whose animal comes up in every conversation.

Both take a name on the front, and the name can be the pet's. We print what you type, so if the card is going out signed by the cat, it goes out signed by the cat.

Silent Night, when you want the quiet option

Not every card needs a punchline. Silent Night is the one we reach for when the card is going to someone older, or to a family who have had a rough year and would not thank you for a gag.

It still takes a name, so it is personal without being loud. Worth having a couple of these in the pile when you are working through a list of twenty.

What every card in the range shares

The whole Christmas card collection runs on the same spec, which makes ordering a mixed batch simple.

• £3.95 each, and that is the price of all 29 designs in the collection, family ones and novelty ones alike

• 6x6, printed on 300gsm premium cardstock

• a matching white envelope with every card

• the inside left blank, so the message is in your handwriting rather than ours

• a personalised or standard front, so the name is optional on almost every design

There are no size or frame options on cards. They are flat 6x6 cards and that is the only format they come in, so nothing to choose beyond the design and the name.

How we make them

Every card is printed to order at our studio in Hessle. We are a husband and wife team, Lee and Sam, so when a name comes through, one of us actually reads it.

We send a proof before anything gets printed. That is your chance to catch a spelling, a missing middle name, or the fact that you have typed eleven names onto a twelve-name signpost. It takes a minute and it saves the awkward conversation later.

Because they are personalised, cards with a name printed on them are non-returnable for a change of mind. We would rather write that here than leave it in a policy page. The proof is there so nothing is printed that you have not already seen and approved.

We are not going to quote a turnaround. What we will say is that December gets busy, and the last fortnight of it is not the moment to order twelve personalised cards. If the names matter, order earlier in the season.

Where to start

The full Christmas card collection has all 29 designs at £3.95, and the greeting cards collection covers the rest of the year once the tree is down.

If you want the framed side of Christmas rather than the paper side, the Christmas collection has the prints, and our guide to personalised Christmas family prints walks through the five family designs in it. For the Traitors cards, the gamer ones and the rude ones, the novelty card guide has those covered.