Wasn't it William Blake who originally wrote 'Liar Liar, Pants on Fire'?
Actually, his version was a little more eloquent: 'Deceiver, Dissembler, Your Trousers Are Alight.'
But with so many privately-owned UK retailers coming forth recently to say that their internet sales, and their Christmas like-for-like sales as a result, were rocketing, the less refined version sprang to our minds.
Let's first remember that it was, so Sainsbury's chief executive Justin King complained, the most difficult Christmas for 30 years in the UK retail sector. Consumers played hard ball and discounting was rife.
So it's been puzzling us this month how so many privately-owned bricks-and-mortar retailers came out of it looking so good.
There is no doubt that the internet played its part and we at the site here have been happy to accept that as a good enough explanation. The internet clearly came into its own for many store chains. But an old supplier friend of ours has a bit of a conspiracy theory.
'I don't think it is a coincidence that so many firms that did so well over Christmas had stellar online sales. But, as we all know, and with clothing in particular, you get a lot of returns from selling online. My question is, were those returns booked in to the published online or like-for-like sales figures?' he says.
In fact in one case, he suggests, the returns did not appear to begin trickling back through one retailer's systems until two weeks after they normally would.
Let's bear in mind that up to 50 per cent of online sales at some clothing retailers are returned.
Most private retailers who report over Christmas only report a very limited period - sometimes as little as a handful of weeks and certainly not beyond January 4. That is 10 days after Christmas and including six days when people may not be hard at work processing those returns thorough stores and warehouses.
Clearly this more sleight of hand than it is telling fibs.
More a quirk of the system - something that could be easily be dismissed as a necessary oversight in the rush to release figures.
And it's worth mentioning that these figures are not audited and never will be, so Christmas trading figures from private firms don't really need to stand up to too much scrutiny.
But, if even a portion of the returns were not swiftly accounted for, that would certainly flatter the figures and that is probably not something that a publicly owned retailer would be able to pass off very comfortably because, well, things would probably catch up with them in the end (trading in the following period would potentially show a sharper dip than onlookers would expect).
For all those private retailers - and some of them clearly did very well regardless - we may not find out for a long time. By the time they compile annual figures things will just look less impressive than we might have expected.
But the next time some of them report figures relating to that period could be in their Companies House filing a year or more away. By then the glories of this Christmas will be, more or less, lost in time.
