This holiday season is looking to be a merry one for both brick and mortar and online retailers. comScore was forecasting a 15% increase over last year’s record-breaking billion dollar day on Cyber Monday and all indications are this year will beat it. Retail sales climbed 16 percent on Black Friday, and shoppers spent $398.62 on average, up from $365.34 a year earlier, the National Retail Federation said yesterday, citing a survey from BIGresearch.

ComScore, an online traffic tracker, noted that Black Friday brought in $816 million in U.S. online sales, making it the heaviest online spending day to date this year. Friday’s online sales revenues represented a 26% spending increase compared to the same day last year.

Retailers traditionally pull out the big deals for the holiday shopping season and this year was no exception. Major retailers like Best Buy were opening Thanksgiving night with major sales on select items that had crowds lining up before they even finished the pumpkin pie.  While the economy continues to lumber along, many analysts were fretting over the holiday numbers. Meanwhile, it seems Americans are tired of saving their money and staying home and decided to take advantage of rock bottom prices designed to lure them back to stores.

Stocks rallied on Cyber Monday as news of the Black Friday success was heard, meaning a very Merry Christmas for not just little boys and girls, but for ailing retail outlets suffering through down numbers and low expectations.  Apple and Amazon were big winners on Friday.

New to the mix this year is a robust mCommerce report on purchases via mobile. The iPhone led among mobile devices, according to IBM, accounting for 6.58 percent of m-commerce activity, followed by Android with 5.2 percent and the iPad with 4.71 percent.