By ALAN PERROTT
More than ever, the fingers are doing the talking.
Text messaging New Year and Christmas calls to mum, dad and friends is becoming a favoured means of saying "gidday" for thousands of New Zealanders.
Vodafone and Telecom estimate they carried 8.8 million texts to friends and family on Christmas Day,
more than two for every person in the country.
Vodafone's network alone carried 9 million texts either side of New Year.
Kevin Bowler, Telecom's head of marketing for mobile, said text messaging was undergoing double-digit growth.
"Texting is increasingly the way people want to communicate," he said.
Vodafone brand director Chris Taylor said older people were now catching on to the text habit.
"We know we have a lot more customers now than we used to, but it is also a matter of new users catching up with the capabilities of the technology," he said.
Vodafone was carrying about 2.4 million texts on average a day compared with 1.3 million a year ago.
The 4.8 million Christmas texts sent by Vodafone users was an increase of 1.8 million on the previous year.
"I think people are catching on to the benefits of texting and of course it helps that more and more people are carrying phones," said Mr Taylor.
"One of the great benefits is that you can communicate with people without having to have a conversation."
Despite the surge in texting, landlines still connected most families.
Telecom says people made more than 81 million calls by landline phone between Christmas Eve and January 2, compared with 24 million mobile calls.
