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Did you get a voucher as a Christmas gift? If so, you're not alone.

I spent part of Sunday shopping, and part of Monday reporting on shopping, and found the off-loading of vouchers seemed to be as important as the search for sale bargains.

This hunch was borne out by George Reader, centre manager at Silverburn shopping centre in Glasgow.

He reckons people are using tokens within families and between friends to bank their Christmas spending until prices fall with the start of winter sales.

And this week, they're keen to spend those tokens before VAT goes up to 20%.

That's a canny approach. But maybe there's more to it than that?

Could it say more about us, our choices and our relationships with friends and family: either that we know less about each other's preferences, or we increasingly respect each other's right, ability or freedom to make their own choices?

Could this voucher boom reflect the rapid decline of the cheque, as a means of gifting money?

Or could it be that the weather made shopping rather less pleasurable over recent weeks, so we minimised how much had to be carried home through the snow and ice?

Vouchers don't break when you slip and fall.

When you look at what's available through shop tokens, you can see that supply is driving some of this.

Shops such as WH Smith offer racks with scores of different options - magazine subscriptions of your choice, white-water rafting to be redeemed when it suits you, with brands and stores galore, much of it led by online retail such as Apple's iTunes.

It's a long way from the days when book tokens were the only major multi-store voucher.

They were first issued in Britain in 1932, and they're now digitised.

But they're yet to become usable to online book sales - could it be that traditional bookshops don't want another way for Amazon to gain market share?

That's not the only trend emerging from this year's retail splurge, as the British Retail Consortium warns that its members are downbeat about the prospects once these sales are over.

The John Lewis Partnership has found the trend is not only towards online sales, but a bit of forward planning too.

It reported Christmas Day visitors to its website up 25% on last year, and sales up 45%, as people took a two-day advantage of offers before the stores for clearance sales on Monday morning.

Demand subsided from 1pm to 4pm on Christmas Day, and then rose to its peak between 9pm and 10pm.

What were they buying? Luxury bedding led the way, and signs that people were already planning next year's splurge when this one still had a long way to run: packs of Christmas gift tags were the sixth best selling product.

Finally, from the US and Australia, another trend to the Christmas sales this year: "self-gifting".

After three years of austerity, stores are claiming people have spent December leaving at least a bit of their budget to spoil themselves.

And why not? The only people even more keen on people spoiling themselves are the shops where they do so.