Know what a Christmas market is?  If you’re American, you might well not – Wikipedia lists only six of them for our country, while there are closer to 30 entries for Europe.  Still, that’s all the more reason to show interest in a new Hitwise report on the subject.

Shopping online the day after Christmas is becoming a family holiday tradition, says Nielsen//NetRatings. Overall visits to Internet shopping sites that day jumped 35 percent over last year, adding eight million more people to the virtual elbowing party.

What is your favorite Christmas song? Are you a fan of the traditional hymns like Silent Night or do you prefer the more contemporary songs like Jingle Bell Rock? Do you know all of the 12 Days of Christmas? Are you waiting patiently for your Winter Wonderland to arrive?

A glut of web searches for the Nintendo Wii has made it the most desirable gadget for Christmas, surpassing the perennial iPod for the top spot. To emphasize this point, the Wii was launched in the UK last week and it sold all 50000 of the available consoles in 12 hours, making the sale rate for the Wii at 1 console sold per second.

It’s Christmas time, a time for making wish lists that may or may not be fulfilled. What do you want for Christmas? What needs to be done before the family gets here? All of these questions usually lead to comprehensive lists that tend to rule our lives during the month of December.

Never let it be said that Google doesn’t embrace the holiday season. From various logo designs to free Google Checkout use, Google has always been very festive during the month of December.

Google’s weekly report on the top search gainers, Zeitgeist, came with its usual disheartening revelations, boxed and wrapped by Christmas fanfare.

MSN has ramped up its online ad activity for Windows Live Messenger, ahead of Live.com’s launch in the New Year, with a Christmas campaign site that’s aimed at promoting its video-call service.

AOL Video says Merry Christmas to customers of their online video service by giving away free movies.

If you are an avid online holiday shopper, enjoy making some purchases tax-free while you still can.

The creators of the online gift sharing community known as Drop Spot restore a little faith in the human race by starting a chain of giving, linking cities across the United States.

Sprite decided to “get weird” ( reg. req.) to stand out from other, more bombastic, colas.

Google followed the addition of two new extensions for the Firefox browser with the announcement of two new features for the Gmail service.

“Christmas timethe only time I know of, in the long calendar of the [online] year, when men and women seem by one consent to open their shut-up [wallets] freely, and to think of people below them as if they really were fellow-passengers to [eBay], and not another race of creatures bound on other journeys”

So after being told of a good way to avoid the traffic-and-tryptophan-induced fisticuffs breaking out at shopping centers everywhere in a way that made perfect sense, you realize you’ve been hornswaggled. Cyber Monday, like Valentine’s Day, is a brand of marketing genius created a week in advance. Welcome to I-Feel-Stupid Tuesday, merry stinkin’ Christmas.

There is so much to tell you, it’s hard to find where to start. Start at the beginning? No, I think we’ll start with today. Today is Cyber Monday, the latest buzz-phrase hitting commerce news and the online answer to the frantic, good-will-towards-men elbowing and man-handling that occurs on Black Friday, all in the name of a guy who told us to give all our stuff away, not collect more. Ahem. Sorry bout the preachin’.

According to Hitwise, online shoppers begin their Christmas season even before little Johnny can recover from his Halloween stomachache. For the week ending November 5th, US Internet searches on the term [Christmas] were up 41% over the previous week.

Ladies and gentlemen, children of all ages… We are proud to welcome you to the one, the only, the uniquely meglomartical Yahoo Shoposphere!

Christmas is coming. Six months from [June 25th], retailers and E-Tailers relying on a strong holiday season will be assessing the bounties of the season. The winter holiday season is the most important segment of the year for North American retail businesses, often accounting for more than half of annual revenues.

Bill Gates may not have meant to let it slip that the next-generation game console would ship in 2005, but he did.

When I read Tig’s post about there being a hidden message in GM’s outdoor billboard campaign, my brain switched into Ralphie …