This Christmas and New Year will see a bumper crop of text and picture messages as friends and family share their season’s greetings according to communications company Orange. Millions of text and MMS get sent across the Orange network everyday but at Christmas and New Year the numbers rise as customers share their greetings and snapshots of their dodgy Christmas jumpers.

Last festive season was a record year for Orange with more than 100 million text messages and more than 1 million picture messages being sent by customers on Christmas Day. This year, the numbers are expected to be even higher. Christmas Day is expected to be the busiest for picture messages with around 1.1 million photos of gifts, trees and turkeys.

New Year’s Eve is also expected to break all records with more than 120 million text messages likely to be sent. Last year saw 106million texts and almost 1 million picture messages celebrating the start of 2009.