Frankfurt, Germany — As soon as the Christmas decorations come out of storage, the perennial German debate heats up -- to shop or not to shop on Sundays?
While most of western Europe allowed stores to open on Sunday years ago, it remains a highly sensitive issue in Germany.
In recent days, a German trade union has threatened to strike to secure overtime pay for shop workers, and churches in Berlin have mounted a legal bid to stop the faithful being lured to the malls.
The festive period is a money-spinner for German shops as November and December account for 20 percent of their annual turnover.
Retailers are generally eager to extend opening hours by as long as possible, in particular this year when they are hoping to recover from a spending lull in the first few months of 2007 following the introduction of a three-percent increase in value-added tax to 19 percent from 16 percent.
It has led to a head-on confrontation between the dictates of commerce and tradition in a country where many still believe the seventh day should be devoted to family.
Even in big German cities, it was long unthinkable to buy even something as simple as a frozen chicken or a pair of socks after 7:00 pm on weekdays and 2:00 pm on Saturday.
But times are changing here too. Since last year, authorities in the country's 16 regional states have been free to fix opening hours as they wish.
It led to opening hours being extended to 8:00 pm on weekdays in most of the country and limited Sunday shopping.
This year, it is only the staunchly Catholic states of Saarland in the west and Bavaria in the south that have decided to keep shops shut on Sunday. In the rest of the country, they will open at least one Sunday a month.
The Protestant Church of Berlin lamented that Sunday trade has therefore become "the rule instead of the exception."
It has joined forces with the Catholic Church in the capital to seek an injunction from the Federal Constitutional Court to keep the shops closed.
"You are desecrating the day of the Lord and breaking the Third Commandment. Jesus said the sabbath is there for man to use, he certainly did not say that it is there for commerce to exploit man," Bishop Wolfgang Huber, head of the Evangelical Church in Germany, wrote on his Internet website.
In several German regions, the Church has formed an unlikely alliance with workers' unions to keep Sundays free of shopping and therefore a day of rest for sales assistants.
In September, the powerful service trade union Verdi organised a protest evening under the banner "Gospel instead of shopping" in Bavaria.
The union is threatening to launch strikes against extended shopping hours and employers' plans to scrap overtime pay for evening work.
"Shopworkers are up in arms," said a spokeswoman for Verdi, Cornelia Haas.
For all the opposition it has sparked it is far from clear that the relaxing of Sunday shopping rules is a sellout success and many shopkeepers are not taking advantage of deregulation.
The chamber of commerce in the western state of Hesse, which incorporates Germany's financial capital Frankfurt, said it was "too soon to say."
In Baden-Wuerttemberg in the southwest, 92 percent of stores questioned by the employers' federation in the region said they had not changed their closing hours. The situation was similar in Thuringia in the former communist east of the country.
Yet the chamber of commerce in the eastern state does not believe that deregulation has proven irrelevant.
"It was right to free commerce from the draconian laws," it said.
Verdi claims later closing times have proven a flop because Germans are not in the mood for spending money and not in the habit of shopping late.
"Shops that have extended their hours are suffering losses. Simply because people do not do their shopping at 10:00 pm!" it said.
Consumer indices show that Germans are worried about high oil prices and the rising cost of basic food products like butter. It suggests they are unlikely to hit the shops, early or late, Christmas or not.