We send a holiday card with a pic (or pics) of the cat on the front and have a short little family newsletter printed on the inside but leave enough white space at the bottom to still write a few personalized sentences.
We've used Simply to Impress for the past several years (always with a 50% off coupon code). Used to buy holiday cards and special holiday printer paper and then printed out the letter on the paper, folded it up and put in the cards but it was a lot of work, formatting, and printer ink.
My mom now tracks in a spreadsheet the people she does/doesn't get responses from. After 2-3 years of no reciprocation, the person/family gets taken off the mailing list unless it's someone that's unable to reciprocate due to age, etc. She likes to wait a couple years because sometimes someone will have a difficult year (death of spouse, etc.) and may not feel up to mailing out their usual cards that year.
Spreadsheet check-the-box method as the cards come in is easy because we have a holiday letter address spreadsheet that we use to generate the address labels. When we were young, my sister and I used to be tasked with hand addressing 80+ cards. Fortunately for me, my sister had much better handwriting so did most of it. Although, I was the one who later on entered my mom's entire physical rolodex into a spreadsheet (which was no mean feat).
My mom's holiday mailing list is now down to maybe 60 or so (or less) that she mails to/keeps in touch with. I enjoy looking at (and reading) most of the cards that come in.
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