Well surprise, surprise. The Camerons really do have it spot on with this year’s Christmas card: black and white, chic, elegantly low key. The entire gang’s assembled on the family sofa, surrounded by homely detritus including a plastic potty. No snazzy Barbadian background or frosted Klosters vista here, thanks. It’s got festive economy written all over it.

The downbeat glamour of a credit crunch Crimbo is also in evidence in the Prince of Wales’s card. This year it’s a snapshot of Charles and Camil-la on the deck of a ship, sharing a joke in the rain, her with a placky Auntie Nora umbrella, a million miles away from the splendour of a studio set-up. On scores of other marble mantelpieces that paragon of luxury, Liz Hurley, is pictured prancing around in a bikini while her husband lies face down, stark-ers apart from a Santa hat. A Santa hat – yours for £1? Where’s the chopper and the country pile, Liz?

Then there’s the Notting Hill dweller who has sent out a card picturing his family dressed as Dickensian paupers, holding a sign saying, “West London life-style to support: please give generously.”

In keeping with the mood, the numbers of Christmas cards sent and received this year seem to be down, too. Nicky Haslam, the interior decorator, has received only 30 so far – “Not very many and I notice a lot of grandees are sending charity cards instead of custom-made.” Mary Killen, doyenne of modern manners, concurs: “I’ve had very few cards this year, not because I’m less popular but because I think everyone is paralysed with fear and doesn’t want to spend anything, even on cards. And some religious authority said it was fine not to send them.”

Of those received and logged, she says she has had only four “boast” cards, where children are lounging around in Antigua and so on: “One friend who usually sends shots of her kids sprawling over the family Jaguar just had photos of their heads. Quite remarkable.” Happily my own card – through accident as much as design – is marching to the same thrifty beat. Its production values are admittedly low. Three of the junior Millards are clad in golden “star” balaclavas from Matalan (£2 each), sneaked from the school dressing-up box. The children are standing in front of our tree. The youngest, who flatly refused to wear his star, has been transformed via Photoshop into a bauble and the overall picture was taken by my husband on his, um, phone. The general tone is, I hope, as wholesomely homespun as a babe in a manger.

Children certainly work wonders: in straitened times Tiny Tim warms the heart, even if Peter York, the arbiter of style, tells me he finds Christmas cards with people’s children on them “rather annoying: sort of ‘Here we all are contented at the garden gate’.”

My friend Janie Denham used to hire a photographer to take shots of her two children, Gabriella, 5, and Jemima, 9, at a cost of £700 a session. This year she changed her policy and raided the family album instead: “I thought my husband would take rather a dim view of me hiring a photographer. So I looked through the summer photos and used a casual shot of the girls leaning against a tree. It’s so natural, I love it.” And cards she has received from friends? “Low key. And a lot of them are homemade.”

The events organiser Henry Conway, who appeared on possibly the most famous card of the year when his family’s annual missive was splashed across the press in the wake of the expenses scandal that toppled his father Derek Conway MP, won’t be sending one out. “This year we’ll be doing charity,” he says. “A contemporary artist friend sent me a packet of the pill with a picture of a pregnant Virgin Mary on it and I was completely scandalised. But she is an atheist.”

Sue Timney, the textile designer, spent practically nothing on producing her card. It involves a photo of a bird – taken by her new husband Justin de Villeneuve, the fashion photographer – and a drawing of laurel branches, by her. “I have always been conscious of cost and how to find ways around it. It’s part of being a designer. On previous Christmases I used an external printer to produce beautiful handmade cards, but this year we have just used paper and ink. Our biggest expense has been Photoshop,” she says.

“Now this financial crisis is upon us we have to think around situations, but you find you can produce something just as spectacular for virtually nothing. Frankly the end result won’t be all that different.”

Nicholas Coleridge, the novelist and Condé Nast magazine supremo who routinely dispatches 500 cards, is widely regarded as something of a barometer when it comes to the ins and outs of Christmas card etiquette. “Nicholas’s card is like the first cuckoo in spring,” says one Notting Hill yummy mummy. “It is a sign that the party season has started.” But even Coleridge, who in the past always sent out an über-glossy card, has this year dumped the production values and kept it simple and homely, like Cam-eron. “Our four children are all wearing jeans,” Coleridge says. “They are very scruffy indeed.” Is that deliberate? “Yes. I think informality is nice.”

So do many of his friends on the basis of cards already received. There’s a general theme. Daytime clothes are in; football shirts if you must. A bit of tinsel in the hand of the tiniest is de rigueur, but don’t dream of processing them anywhere but the local shop.

“I don’t seem to have received many flash cards,” says Coleridge. “Maybe two or three with children on motor cruisers or yachts. I think that’s a bit show-offy, don’t you?”

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