The lights, the carols on every street corner, the crowds on the streets, the bags people carry, the relentless drive to buy presents - it is a scene repeated all over the (Christian) world year after year.

Or is it?

On the face of it, the same scenes are being repeated in our commercial centres these days.

The shop owners, or retail outlet entrepreneurs, have done their best to prepare for the Christmas shopping spree.

According to the only questionnaire done so far (Illum, last Sunday, but there will be others later, especially by GRTU) they are still what we ciould call 'moderately hopeful'. 65% say sales are 'not bad' and 63% say business is more or less like last year's.

There are however two factors that might impinge on this optimism.

First of all, the Maltese have become inveterate online shoppers, apart from those who take short holidays to buy things from abroad.

The Maltese come second only to the British in the purchase of clothes online, results of an EU survey issued earlier this month show 

Eurostat said that the proportion of individuals aged 16 to 74 who have ordered goods or services for private use over the internet ("e-buyers") has risen from 30% in 2007 to 53% in 2015 across the EU. 

Clothes and sports goods were the top item bought on the internet in 19 Member States. The highest share of e-buyers who purchased clothes online in 2015 was registered in the United Kingdom (74%), ahead of Malta (72%) and Bulgaria (71%).

Somewhere else, it has been mentioned that the Maltese are spending not less than €200 million on e-shopping.

Obviously, all this money sent abroad means less money spent here.

At the same time, the number of shops keeps increasing. New shopping arcades multiply, shops keep getting bigger and better and indeed offer buyers a paradise of sights, sounds and opportunities.

Gone are the shops of old which were probably inherited from one generation to the other and which probably cost nothing except the water and electricity bills to run.

Today's outlets are mostly rented and the initial cost to set up an outlet are amazing. Hence the urge to make sales and quick profits.

The lit-up shops give an image of prosperity and affluence, as do the crowds with bags of purchases. But this image may be superficial and unfortunately easily rubbed off.

Again, it is far too early to come to any sort of conclusion, but sporadic contacts with people in the trade may be on the pessimistic side, with a few days to go before Christmas. Most of it is anecdotal. It is enough for a day or two of pouring rain, for instance, to wipe off the buyers from the streets and to force people to concentrate on just the presents they cannot do without.

In previous years, this government used to argue that with the cuts in the water and electricity bills, people had more money to spend. Then of course there is the Christmas bonus which was supposed to have the same effect. But year after year of this repeated insistence has dented the impact. At the end of the Christmas shopping spree we never seem to have enough money.

The retail sector is one big sector in the national economy and on it depend many jobs and families. It is a temperature gauge of the consistency of the economy. Year after year, we all watch with bated breath for the retail owners to tell us whether the economy is in health or sick.

But in this case, the massive inroads of online shopping, the shopping holidays abroad, etc could be making huge holes in the sector as a whole, and any shopping by tourists who happen to be here in these days does not quite compensate for lost sales.