There was a time when Boxing Day was simple: you'd either slip on your new sweater – vindictively knitted for you by some ageing aunt – and pop out to the sales, the football or the racing. Alternatively – if you were a City gent – you'd don the red coat and cream breeches, mount your animal and chase a fox across some pal's estate.
Nowadays, the rules are more complex, and not just for hunting. It seems fashionable to spend most of the month wearing the daft sweaters that were once permitted only on 26 December, while when the scrum that is the Boxing Day sales kicks off on Thursday, you'd be forgiven for thinking that the madness started weeks ago too.
Retailers increased discounts last week, with nearly three-quarters holding sales or promotions in a last-ditch attempt to attract shoppers.
The average discounts rose to 46%, compared with 42% the week before and 44% in the same week last year, according to the accountancy firm PwC. Of the 100 top high-street retailers it monitors, 72% were holding sales.
Meanwhile, for those still able to focus on a computer screen while still digesting their Christmas lunch, they can start the Boxing Day sales remotely just as Her Majesty is addressing her people. Is nothing sacred?
Rent collector is no joke for retailers
Knock, knock. Yes, that's the cheery sound of commercial landlords across the land and their once-a-quarter tap on the door as they collect their dues.
It's never a high point for retailers, and this week's call promises to be as brutal as recent years, even though the economy is supposedly convalescing. So expect some fraught renegotiations and offers by shopkeepers to cough up in January. If those pleas fail, then some shopkeepers will make a sneaky trip to a local court to file paperwork that might keep the rent man at bay (notices of intention to appoint an administrator are not published).
In any case, according to insolvency firm Begbies Traynor, 151 UK retailers now have critical financial problems, up from 140 at the same point last year. If that statistic is slightly surprising given recent news on the economy, then the source of the rise certainly causes an eyebrow to arch. The increase is not so much to do with old-fashioned shops, but online retailers.
Julie Palmer, a Begbies partner, explains: "There are a lot of new start-up businesses on the internet and with start-ups there is always a larger proportion that fail in the first year."
Not such a merry Christmas.
A good week to bury bad news?
What do Teliti International, SThree plc, Premier African Minerals, LiteBulb Group and Berkeley Mineral Resources have in common?
Well, apart from them all being public companies that hardly anybody has ever heard of, all five have decided to schedule annual general meetings for this week when, you might have noticed, their shareholders' attentions have the potential for drifting elsewhere.
It is surely a coincidence, but only at LiteBulb are investors showing any signs of making a profit on their stakes during 2013 (a year in which the stock markets as a whole have boomed) but expect all votes to have been stuck in with the Christmas mail, rather than anyone actually showing up at the venues to question the management.
Still, if you think that provides the City's corporate financiers with a pleasingly light schedule, then they are positively swamped when you compare their workload with that of economist colleagues.
"As markets begin the wind down for the Christmas period, data releases are set to thin out," economists from Investec say of this week – a line which is flirting recklessly with understatement.
In fact, there are zero UK economic releases this week.
