Daily deal industry tracking firm Yipit reports that the daily deal industry in North America experienced marginal growth in November, as the major sites were adversely affected by the Thanksgiving holiday.

The number of deals offered increased only 1 percent while total industry gross billings grew by 2 percent during the month.

The largest provider, Groupon, saw the biggest decline.

Groupon grew 6 percent in November, but experienced a double-digit decline during the Thanksgiving holiday week.

Yipit bases its estimates on the sales of vouchers, which it tracks closely. Although Groupon no longer reveals exact sales data on its site, Yipit maintains that it is still able to make fair predictions based on historical data and industry insights.

The daily-deal declines were in stark contrast to the Black Friday experience of online retailers, which saw sales increase to $816 million on the day after Thanksgiving. ComScore said it was the heaviest online spending day to date in 2011, representing a 26 percent increase over the same day in 2010.

The holiday declines occurred despite ambitious programs by both Groupon and LivingSocial, which tried to take advantage of the heavy retail season.

Groupon stepped up its marketing efforts through “Grouponicus,” a holiday shop selling local gifts, deals and travel getaways.

LivingSocial’s Black Friday efforts included offering deals for 20 national brands, including gift cards from Electronic Arts, OfficeMax, Verizon Wireless, Skype and BlueNile.com. LivingSocial even launched a national TV campaign and radio spots to promote the deals.

But Yipit says those efforts didn’t pay off.

For the seven-day period ended Nov. 28, LivingSocial’s gross billings were down 30 percent and 19 percent compared to the two previous periods. And, because of the lower-priced national deals, the average size of its deal price fell to $28 in November from $32 a month earlier.

Yipit did not try to explain why the drops occurred around the holidays, except that they are similar to other periods, such as the Fourth of July.

But the patterns could be compared to social gaming space, which saw its usage sink during the holidays because people were not at work.

A secondary factor may be that more traditional retailers are known for Black Friday offers for others, while daily deals have historically been looked at as items you buy for yourself, and are not necessarily thought of as gifts.

Finally, Yipit said following Groupon and LivingSocial, Travelzoo, AmazonLocal and Google Offers ranked as the third, fourth and fifth largest national providers in November.

No word yet on how daily deals performed in the lead-up to Christmas in December.

Either way, consumers barely waited until Santa got back to the North Pole before hitting up the stores again.

ComScore reports that e-commerce spending for the first 48 days of the holiday season — ended Dec. 19 — reached $32 billion, jumping 15 percent over last year. In one week alone, at least four individual days surpassed the $1 billion mark.

And IBM, which analyzes mobile shopping trends using data from 500 retailers nationwide, said shoppers continued pulling out their credit cards on Christmas Day, as they shopped for themselves after shopping for others.

IBM found that on Dec. 25, online sales grew by 16.4 percent over Christmas Day 2010. (IBM’s results do not include Amazon.com, the Internet’s largest e-tailer.)

Many of the online sessions on a retailer’s site were initiated from a mobile device, accounting for 18.3 percent of traffic, up from 8.4 percent last year. Mobile sales grew to 14.4 percent versus 5.3 percent on Christmas last year.

As stated in a report that came out earlier this week, most mobile shopping was conducted on iOS devices. The iPad led all mobile-device traffic at 7 percent, followed by iPhone at 6.4 percent and Android at 5 percent, according to IBM.

Many of the days surrounding the holidays have acquired quirky nicknames, such as Cyber Monday (the Monday after Thanksgiving), Black Friday (the day after Thanksgiving) and Green Monday (the second Monday of December).

Perhaps this Christmas will qualify as Sofa Sunday.

The term was first introduced to me by Joaquin Ruiz, the co-founder and CEO of Padopolis, which makes a catalog app for the iPad. He was hoping the Sunday after Thanksgiving would see a spike in traffic after everyone hit the mall on Black Friday and then curled up on the couch with their iPad the following Sunday to recover.

This year, Christmas Sunday’s shopping spike continued into Monday, also known as Boxing Day. IBM said that online sales were up 10 percent by midday on Monday, over Dec. 26 last year, and that mobile sales were up 13.8 percent.

(Image courtesy of iStockphoto | mattjeacock)

The electronics manufacturer placed behind Target, Best Buy, Wal-Mart and Amazon, according to a comScore report that analyzed online shopping trends the day after Thanksgiving.

“Apple has not historically been in the top five — in fact, this is the first time I can remember,” said Andrew Lipsman, an analyst at comScore, who added that Apple was “nipping at Target’s heels,” registering only a few percentage points lower in overall traffic.

The strong ranking backs up a report today by 9to5Mac that said Apple’s Black Friday sales were “off the charts.” According to its sources, Apple blew away forecasts by 7 pm, and broke records for its biggest sales day ever.

ComScore’s figures include both Apple’s site as well as iTunes, so any resulting sales would encompass both hardware and digital products, such as apps and videos.

Separately, Experian Hitwise ranked Apple as the 12th most-visited retail site on Black Friday. It said the company’s total visits jumped 42 percent compared to 2010.

In both of these circumstances, what’s notable is Apple’s apparent mind share among consumers.

Best Buy, like some other retailers, is trying hard this season to be the go-to source for Apple products, running new TV ads promoting the chain as a place to buy Macs, iPads and iPhones. But Apple was able to rival gigantic big-box retailers, which carry thousands of products, including their own.

That’s impressive, especially since its discounts are generally not.

Lipsman agreed: “Even though Apple does not provide the selection of products that you might find at a big box retailer, it is obviously top of mind when it comes to the most in-demand products, like the iPhone and iPad. Two of the biggest growth sectors right now are tablets and digital content downloads, and obviously Apple is extremely well positioned on both fronts.”

For the first time ever, so-called Cyber Monday registered as the biggest online shopping day of the year despite years of procrastinators lifting other days higher as they waited until a few days before Christmas to do their online shopping.

The theory had always been that consumers who flocked to stores on Black Friday would return to their desks on Monday to continue buying deals online.

Last year, the plan panned out and more than $1 billion-worth in items were added to virtual shopping carts across the U.S. to make it the heaviest online shopping day of the year — and the first time ever that a single day eclipsed the billion-dollar mark.

Now, with November already off to a strong start with a 15 percent increase in sales compared to the same period last year, another strong Monday could be in the works, according to comScore, which tracks online holiday spending. The research firm tracks shopping from fixed Internet connections, meaning it doesn’t count items purchased on phones or tablets.

Black Friday — the day after Thanksgiving — alone saw online sales of $816 million, making it the heaviest online spending day to date in 2011 and representing a 26 percent increase over the same day in 2010, comScore reported.

ComScore Chairman Gian Fulgoni said, “We now turn our attention to Cyber Monday, a day that Shop.org says will see eight in ten retailers running special online promotions. Last year, Cyber Monday was the heaviest day of online spending ever, with sales exceeding $1 billion, and we fully expect to see another record set this year.”

Cyber Monday may finally be living up to its name.

Amazon is a prime example of a retailer working hard to pry open wallets today.

Last year, the largest e-commerce company said Cyber Monday was Amazon’s peak day with more than 13.7 million items ordered worldwide, setting a record for 158 items sold per second.

Today, it will be important to achieve that pace again.

On Sunday, it bought full-color circulars in newspapers around the country promoting its lineup of discounts in its special Cyber Monday store.

On the front page, it touted its full lineup of Kindle e-readers, and a couple of pages were also dedicated to sales supposedly so steep you had to go online to see the prices for electronics, cellphones and videogames.

The Cyber Monday store, however, appeared a little unorganized with random “lightning deals,” which ranged from gift baskets to knife sets, board games, power tools and inexpensive jewelry — but nothing that seemed like the hit item of the season.

Other leading retailers, including Wal-Mart, Best Buy and Target, will also be expected to offer special deals.

Surely, the theory goes, if enough marketing dollars are spent, and the discounts are substantial enough, it might get consumers to turn out again to break another record.

In a blog post, comScore analyst Andrew Lipsman explained that last year’s shopping bonanza on Cyber Monday — which was first named that six years ago — was finally successful thanks to consumer awareness.

Over the past few years, it’s been steadily climbing.

In 2009, it was the second-biggest shopping day; in 2008, it ranked third. Before that, it wasn’t even close to the top. In 2006, it ranked 12th and in 2007, it ranked ninth.

“Today the majority of consumers know what it is and the attractive types of deals they can anticipate. With increased awareness comes increased participation on the part of both retailers and consumers,” he wrote.

So, now we have to wait to see if the deals — and the shoppers — both turn out, or if Cyber Monday turns out to be just another big sales day.

(Image credit: iStockphoto.com/mbortolino)

In a statement Friday, AT&T said commissioners won’t be able to vote a proposal announced Tuesday from FCC Chairman Julius Genachowski that the $39 billion merger be sent before an administrative law judge. The carrier announced it had withdrawn its FCC application in the early hours of the Thanksgiving holiday in the U.S.

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Look, it might just be an Internet meme, but it’s a good one, turning a bad situation into something else.

I am not sure what that is exactly, but above you can see the Thanksgiving version of one of the many takes on Tumblr placing the pepper-spraying cop in different and unlikely scenes.

And below it is a new T-shirt that mashes up the pepper-spray meme with the much-beloved Honey Badger one.

In recent years, Web retailers made hay out of “Cyber Monday,” realizing many office workers shopped from their desks right after the Thanksgiving holiday. But just as brick-and-mortar stores are pushing holiday promotions earlier and earlier on the calendar, the Web version of Christmas creep means online stores including Amazon.com Inc. and closely held Jewelry Television have moved up their own promotions, in some cases overlapping with Halloween.

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In a new filing with the Securities and Exchange Commission concerning its upcoming IPO, Zynga is expected to unveil two key management and board changes at the online gaming phenom:

Chief Business Officer Owen Van Natta — who came to the San Francisco-based start-up several years ago to help CEO Mark Pincus grow it and develop it — will step down from his job and become a strategic adviser focusing on major partnerships. He’ll still remain board member at Zynga, but will give up millions of pre-IPO shares by moving out of his operational role.

And director and venture investor Brad Feld will leave the the board, which VCs sometime do as companies move to a public offering and add members with more specific business experience.

In his place, longtime entrepreneur and investor Sunil Paul, who founded a company called FreeLoader with Pincus many moons ago, will join the board.

Zynga confirmed the changes to me in a statement by Pincus:

“Owen is a valuable business partner. He’s made great contributions to Zynga and continues to be an important part of our team.”

Sources said the changes related to Van Natta around are not part of a recent controversy around a Wall Street Journal story about clawing back of some share options grants of early Zynga employees who had become less involved in the company. While the company cannot actually take back already vested shares owned by those staffers, the article has put a lot of scrutiny on Zynga and raised questions about how to cope with the kind of hyper-growth some Internet firms experience.

That’s certainly been the kind of rocket ride Zynga has been on, as it has grown from a small social gaming company on Facebook to a high-profile public company.

Zynga is in the final stages of its IPO process, answering questions from the SEC that are typical. If all goes well, Zynga execs are expected to go on a road show after the Thanksgiving and go public by the end of the year at a market valuation of close to $20 billion.

That was different from when Van Natta officially got to Zynga in the spring of last year — after a rocky experience running the doomed Myspace. At the time, he told me at the time that planned to be focused on scaling the business and did not consider himself a long-term operating executive.

Since then, he has helped Pincus hire a series of experienced gaming execs, including a chief operating officer, a chief marketing officer and others.

Zynga was Van Natta’s third high-profile Web company in recent years. He was a top early exec for Mark Zuckerberg at Facebook until early 2008, and in 2009 he took over News Corp.’s (NWS) MySpace, a job that lasted less than a year.

Early in his career, Van Natta was also was a top strategy, marketing and deal exec for Amazon, which bought an early social networking start-up called PlanetAll that he worked at.

It will now be interesting to see what Van Natta does next, but it is unlikely he will take a permanent position. He is a longtime angel investor in Silicon Valley, including in hot start-ups such as Asana and still holds a significant stake in Facebook.

But, in moving out of his job at Zynga, he will be giving up many millions of shares of a rich trove he was given when he arrived at the company. That said, Van Natta already owns millions of accelerated vested shares and will get another large grant as a board member.

Translation: Don’t cry for Mr. Van Natta, Silicon Valley — he made $42 million last year from Zynga shares alone.

But the strategy might backfire. Not only are employees upset that they’ll have to staff the stores instead of being able to stay with their families, the move could cannibalize the retailers’ own online and mobile efforts.

Historically, shoppers have lined up in the early hours on the day after Thanksgiving — which has come to be known as Black Friday — to race into stores and be the first to scoop up discounts ahead of the holidays.

This year, stores are jumping the gun by opening a day earlier. Wal-Mart will open at 10 pm, two hours ahead of last year’s opening; Toys “R” Us will open at 9 pm, an hour earlier than last season; and Target will open for four hours when the clock strikes midnight.

On behalf of employees, Change.org has kicked off a petition, “Tell Target to Save Thanksgiving,” which argues that night openings rob hourly and salary workers of time off with their families.

But there may also be an economic reason to maintain standard practices.

Most of these retailers have major online presences and multiple mobile applications, including on the iPad. If they are open 24 hours a day online, must they actually open the doors, too?

After all, Amazon.com is never considered closed.

To get a sense of the strategy, we talked to someone who works on mobile and online strategy at one of the major retailers that is opening early. He told AllThingsD that he was worried about the impact opening early will have on mobile traffic, since traditionally their peak traffic hits between 3 am and 5 am, before stores open on Black Friday.

If customers have the option of visiting the stores in person earlier, it’s unclear whether that pattern will continue — and whether people will do some extra shopping while killing time standing in line waiting for the doors to open.

Even though mobile is still a small contributor compared to online traffic or store traffic, the retailer in question has scaled its infrastructure to accommodate this early-morning surge.

In general, the 2011 holiday season is expected to drive record sales online and from mobile devices.

Chase Paymentech, which analyzes information from the Top 50 e-commerce retailers, reports that online sales are up 25 percent compared to last year. A separate study by IBM predicts that traffic to retail sites from mobile devices is expected to more than double this month from the last holiday season, reaching 15 percent of all visits to retail sites. Last year, on “Cyber Monday,” mobile visits totaled only 3.9 percent.

But Andrew Lipsman, VP of industry analysis at comScore, said he did not believe the impact of opening early would be very significant.

“Thanksgiving Day and Black Friday are not huge online spending days,” he said. “So, even if sales are relatively soft, it should not have a significant impact on the full season for online retailers. At the end of the day, it will likely be a rounding error — if anything.”

ComScore’s data excludes sales made on tablets or mobile phones, but it estimates that those devices account for a minor amount of e-commerce spending — roughly 3 percent.

Here are the key online shopping dates in 2010:

Target Photo Credit: djLicious.

The capital represents the company’s first round, led by Comcast Ventures. Participants in the company’s seed round, totaling $1.3 million, also chipped in, including BlackBerry Partners Fund and El Dorado Ventures.

Padopolis’ co-founder and CEO, Joaquín Ruiz, said the latest version of the application will come out next week, right in time for the holidays.

Improvements include realistic page turns and the ability to mark up content. ”People wanted it to feel like paper while retaining the vivid imagery,” he said. “The little things add up to a lot.”

The new release is not only timed with Black Friday — which is the day after Thanksgiving and is counted as one of the busiest shopping days of the year — but also with something he’s calling “Sofa Sunday.”

“I know when people shop. I know when they are looking. … After you are exhausted with your Black Friday experience, you’ll relax and regroup on Sofa Sunday,” he said.

Padopolis is currently registering millions of page views on the weekends, when the average consumer spends 30 minutes flipping through catalogs. The amount of time increases the farther the users are from stores. If they are more than 100 miles outside of a major city, for example, he says the average kicks up to an hour and 20 minutes per session.

For women between the ages of 25 and 55, he calls it entertainment and relaxation.

“This is not a search, find and buy experience. It’s more about shopping, engaging and discovering,” he said.

Since raising the seed round earlier this year, the company has grown from seven retailers to more than 100, and from three employees to more than a dozen. It has also leased official offices in Los Altos, Calif.

One downside is that it’s also attracted fierce competitors, all angling for a piece of the $100 billion annual business in the U.S. Last year, roughly 20 billion catalogs were mailed, jumping from 18 billion two years ago, and now they are all betting those will go digital.

The biggest name to throw its hat in the ring is Google. It entered the arena in August, leveraging partnerships it had with retailers from its search engine to build an iPad app. TheFind, a six-year-old online shopping comparison site, launched the Catalogue app in May, and Coffee Table updated its app this week with more than 30 catalogs.

“I’m flattered that there’s three to four or five that are mimicking us,” Ruiz said. “It would be more daunting if we were the only ones out there. By this time next year, there will be at most three of us in the space and most likely only two because we’ll have had so much content and aggregation.”

The new funding will be used for growing the marketing and engineering teams at the company. Recently, the company added Claudia Carpenter, VP of user experience, who was a founder of Writely (which was acquired by Google), and Lee Bieber, VP of engineering and operations, who previously was at Rackspace, Intuit and Sun Microsystems.

The Monday after Thanksgiving is one of the busiest online shopping days of the year as everyone returns to work and gets online.

But according to a study conducted by IBM, which analyzed data from more than 500 leading U.S. retailers, mobile is playing a larger role in consumers’ shopping habits, especially around the holidays.

The study found that traffic to retail sites from mobile devices is expected to more than double this month from last season, reaching 15 percent of all visits to retail sites. Last year on Cyber Monday, mobile visits totaled only 3.9 percent.

Of course, mobile is benefiting from the overall trend toward shopping online instead of shopping at the mall. A comScore report released earlier this week found that e-commerce spending was up 13 percent in the third quarter, compared to the same quarter a year earlier, to $36.3 billion.

But in particular, the IBM study says it’s also increasing because of smartphone and iPad penetration. Last month, iPad conversion rates reached 6.8 percent compared to the 3.6 percent conversion rate found for all mobile devices as a category.

This year, the statistics will be supported even more by more iPad sales. A year ago, the iPad was only eight months old. Separately, next week Amazon will be shipping its own tablet, the Kindle Fire, to consumers. If there’s a tablet that’s good for shopping, I’d bet Amazon would make it.

Other findings from the IBM study:

• In October, 10.7 percent of people who logged on to a retailer’s site used a mobile device, up from the 4.2 percent recorded in the same month in 2010.
• Additionally, mobile sales are growing, reaching a high of 9.6 percent in October 2011, up from 3.4 percent in October 2010.
• Social commerce is not seeing as much growth. Facebook accounted for 77 percent of all traffic from social sites, but only 9.2 percent of consumers who visited a retailer site from a social site made a purchase.

Best Buy Co. is joining the list of big store chains opening at midnight after Thanksgiving this year in hopes of getting a jump on the competition, following recent announcements by Target Corp., Macy’s Inc. and Kohl’s Corp.

Best Buy Chief Executive Brian Dunn, said he felt forced to “make a very difficult decision” and open at midnight because rival retailers were doing so, though the decision was controversial inside the company.

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And if you guessed it was from all of those people putting up their unwanted presents on eBay, you are completely, 100 percent…wrong. Dec. 25 and 26 saw record mobile traffic to Zillow.

In general, mobile traffic to the real-estate site surges whenever people are out of the office. During the average weekday, Zillow says that only about 15 percent of traffic comes from mobile devices. On a typical weekend, anywhere from one-fifth to one quarter of Zillow’s traffic is from phones. On Thanksgiving, that figure reached 30 percent, while Christmas Day saw a record number of visits to the mobile site, with phones accounting for a third of all Zillow’s traffic.

As for eBay, it said Dec. 12 was its busiest mobile sales day ever, with the number of transactions well more than double that of the busiest day of 2009. That marked two years in a row that the second Sunday in December was the busiest eBay shopping day.

For those who want to slice eBay’s mobile business in all sorts of ways, the company has posted an interactive graphic with all sorts of fun facts. For instance, auto parts represented 15 percent of mobile sales in Germany as compared with only 8 percent in the U.S.

The retail industry coined the phrase “Cyber Monday” to represent the Monday immediately following Black Friday (the day after Thanksgiving). Presumably everyone was returning to work and continuing their shopping online.

However, the term ended up a misnomer because there was always a day closer to Christmas that exceeded it in sales, as procrastinators waited until the last minute to shop online.

Well, that may change this year, says comScore, which measures such stuff.

“At this late juncture in the online holiday season, we have likely already witnessed the peak spending day of the year, which means that Cyber Monday should emerge as the season’s heaviest online spending day for the first time in history,” said comScore chairman Gian Fulgoni in a release.

That’s not to say other days didn’t come close.

Overall, online spending this year is up 12 percent, when looking at the 47 days between Nov. 1 and Dec. 17, and this past week’s numbers were even higher. Online shopping reached $5.15 billion in the week ended Dec. 17, jumping 14 percent compared to the same period a year ago.

Both Monday and Friday were abnormally strong, coming in at $943 million and $942 million, respectively.

But for the first time ever, neither of those day was able to outperform Cyber Monday, which hit an all-time record of $1.03 billion.

Historically, two days in the past week have particularly stood out. Monday is named “Green Monday” after the color of money, and Friday is called “Free Shipping Day,” because a number of physical and e-commerce retailers teamed up to promote online shopping by giving away free postage for a 24-hour period. Monday was up 12 percent over last year, and Friday was up 61 percent.

Based on historical patterns, comScore had reasoned that one or more days would exceed $1 billion in the past week. Now with Christmas six days away, it’s likely too late to see that kind of volume again. Although Amazon’s cutoff for fee shipping ends tonight, and Wal-Mart’s free shipping (with guaranteed arrival by Dec. 24) ends tomorrow night, and department stores like Macy’s is offering free shipping until Monday for items $99 or more.

In all, the shopping season to date stands at $27.46 billion.

Happy holidays, indeed.

In the first 40 days of the holiday shopping season, comScore estimates that more than $21.95 billion has been spent online, increasing 12 percent vs. last year.

The most recent week saw a spike in sales with $5.15 billion in spending, an increase of 11 percent over last year, as two days each pushed passed $900 million.

But still, it’s likely that the biggest shopping day online has yet to occur. The industry would like you to believe that its “Cyber Monday,” the Monday following Thanksgiving, is the busiest, and while spending hit an all-time record of $1.03 billion on that day this year, procrastinators typically spend more as we get closer to Christmas.

This Monday, Dec. 13, has been coined “Green Monday,” presumably after the color of money. EBay came up with the term after the second Monday in December 2007 kicked off one of the busiest shopping weeks online.

This year seems particularly robust, as shoppers become even more comfortable seeking discounts online. ComScore chairman Gian Fulgoni, surmised: “This coming week, beginning with Green Monday, should see some of the heaviest online shopping activity of the season and we expect at least one more day to surpass the billion dollar spending threshold.”

But the holiday shopping season will naturally slow down starting on Friday, Dec. 17, as free delivery offers expire and it becomes more difficult to get guaranteed delivery by Christmas Eve. Until then, the post office can assume its sleighs will be packed full of cardboard boxes.

Amazon.com is offering free shipping on purchases of $25 or more until Friday, unless you have an Amazon prime subscription. Wal-Mart is offering free shipping–with no minimum–on 60,000 items until Dec. 20. And, Dec. 17 has been coined Free Shipping Day with lots of merchants trying to get shoppers to do last-minute spending online without the penalty of shipping costs.

ComScore said in the past week alone, four days exceeded $800 million in spending, including Cyber Monday, which became the heaviest online spending day on record at $1.028 billion.

On Tuesday, spending hit $911 million, making it the third-heaviest day on record, and Wednesday and Thursday came in at $868 million and $850 million, respectively. These figures include both physical merchandise, and relatively new categories, like virtual goods.

The big winners in the past week have been the Amazon.coms of the world and other large retailers, comScore noted.

The top 25 online retailers generated 20 percent more sales for the month of November, compared to last year, and their share increased to nearly 68 percent of the market. Meanwhile, the marketshare of small-to-mid-size retailers shrunk to 32.2 percent.

These increases aren’t expected to last as some retailers became less aggressive with promotions and discounts toward the end of the week, when year-over-year growth rates fell to single digits. “We may see another week of this effect before late season discounts and buying by procrastinators gives the season a final spending surge,” said comScore chairman Gian Fulgoni.

Those estimates, provided by comScore, include any transaction conducted over the fixed Internet, either from home or work.

That means the record-breaking year also included the intangibles in our lives that you can’t touch or feel, and can’t ship in a box, like e-books and music, and virtual goods, such as a Gingerbread House or a Poinsettia to brighten up your FarmVille home for the holidays.

While likely still a small percentage of the $1 billion-plus in sales (comScore wasn’t willing to break down the numbers), companies like Zynga that develop many popular social games on Facebook didn’t waste any time taking advantage of the shopping frenzy that hits the Monday after Thanksgiving as people return to work and click to buy.

Sales spiked as Zynga kicked off the week with a new holiday lineup. On FrontierVille, users were offered mystery animals, like a polar bear wearing a Santa hat and a penguin sporting a reindeer hat. The second most popular decoration of the day was a blanket of snow for the player’s homestead. It also debuted holiday cheer in FarmVille with a winter horse-drawn carriage and a Santa Gnome as two of the top-selling items.

But it wasn’t all about decorations. On Monday, Zynga offered its most expensive virtual item in FarmVille’s history. The so-called “Unwither Ring,” which has been offered only two other times, costs 250 in Farm Cash (roughly $40). Players who are willing to splurge will never have their crops wither again–a situation that occurs if you show up to plow too late. And if you are looking for something special for that certain someone, the Unwither Ring is also available as a gift.

Santa Clara, Calif.-based PlaySpan, which offers monetization platform services to 1,000-plus online games and social networks, was willing to be a little more specific about Cyber Monday’s spike. Sales of PlaySpan’s game card–available in North America at 7-Eleven, Rite Aid and other stores–were up 69 percent on Black Friday, compared to the previous week. Its corresponding marketplace, which features virtual goods, also reported a substantial increase in purchases over the weekend. The bump in sales increased 11 percent from Thursday through Sunday, compared to the same period a week earlier.

This Cyber Monday isn’t likely to be either the beginning or the biggest day for holiday shopping – but that’s likely all good news for online retail.

Early data from the extended holiday weekend show that few people were waiting until they returned to work to do their online shopping. Instead, they started right after eating Thanksgiving dinner.

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Even without that freakish Thanksgiving treat, the Web is full of fun diversions on every topic, including the thankful, enhanced-patted-down long weekend of consumption Americans have ahead of us.

Read on for some of my Thanksgiving ephemeralia picks for this year:

Here’s a historical tidbit I became aware of after reading the National Archives online today: Did you know that in 1863 President Abraham Lincoln made Thanksgiving a national holiday to be held on the fourth Thursday in November, but in 1939 President Franklin D. Roosevelt changed it to the third Thursday to “to lengthen the Christmas shopping season and boost the economy which was still recovering from the Depression”?

The National Archives Web site also provides some documents from Thanksgiving throughout the years, including this one of President Richard Nixon and a turkey.

On to the food. Want to impress your guests with something less passé than, but still thematically consistent with, Turducken? You are in luck. Here are two fantastic alternatives, via YouTube:

The Cherpumple consists of three full pies encased in three full cakes (via @hunterwalk):

Or, there’s the TurBaconEpic (a bird in a bird in a bird in a bird in a bird in a pig):

“Good Morning America” tries, and fails, to demonstrate how to put out a grease fire (via Gawker.tv):

As for the other topic at hand on this holiday–the new widely derided U.S. airport security procedures–everybody’s favorite Taiwanese animators at Next Media Animation have prepared their usual insightful commentary (from last week, but still good):

For further reading:

• Engadget’s frequently updated list of Black Friday gadget deals.
• Boing Boing’s roundup of Thanksgiving science.
• The Wall Street Journal’s report on using your phone to find shopping deals. Google says there are 30 times more mobile shopping searches than three years ago (though that’s smaller than I would think given the growth of the mobile Internet in that time).

During HP’s earnings call on Monday, Apotheker announced that the company was reversing pay cuts for a majority of the employees affected by a February 2009 salary-reduction plan under former CEO Mark Hurd.

HP also reinstated a company 401(k) plan matching contributions as a fixed benefit, and instituted a new share-ownership plan that would allow employees to buy company shares at a five percent discount.

“HP employees are a highly competitive group who want to win,” Apotheker said on a call with analysts. “They also want to be rewarded for their performance….I believe in the performance-driven culture, and our employees have been performing.”

The moves appear aimed at lifting the morale of a company that’s been reeling from yet another turbulent leadership transition, and helping Apotheker feel more welcome at the iconic Silicon Valley company once admired for its employee-friendly culture.

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