Cyber Monday online holiday sales reached $1.735 billion, which is an increase of 18% from 2012 and a record. J.C. Penney Co. Inc. (NYSE: JCP) said its same-store sales rose 10% in November, which barely takes it off the deathbed. Balance those two pieces of positive news and many others with some negative data. The National Retail Federation disclosed the amount spent per person over the holiday weekend was down. Now, forget all that. The retail sprint has become a marathon. There are 21 shopping days until Christmas, and the real fate of retailers and their industry will not be set for another three weeks.

The primary worry among the largest store-based retailers and e-commerce firms, led by Amazon.com Inc. (NASDAQ: AMZN), is that Americans spent what they had to spend when they flocked in a frenzy to stores last weekend. This theory supposes that the wild deals offered during Thanksgiving and Black Friday were too wonderful to resist. Consumers opened their wallets and spent every lost dollar they had.

Alternatively, shoppers picked through what retailers had to offer last weekend and did not like what they saw, or believe stores will drop prices more because inventories swell as the end of December approaches. These consumers will be back in a week or two to spend most of their money in the final few days of the holiday season.

The trouble with widely publicized data about Thanksgiving, Black Friday and Cyber Monday is that the information can be substantially misleading. On the one hand, the consumer continues to be beaten up by high unemployment and larger payroll taxes this year. One the other hand, gasoline prices have fallen and the values of people’s homes have mostly gone up. Where many consumers stand in the balance is impossible to say, at least until the final tally of money spent by shoppers in November and December gets posted at the start of next year.

Analysts who believe that Thanksgiving weekend sales data are a perfect proxy for the holidays as a whole are wrong. Three weeks is a long time, particularly in a market with tens of millions of shoppers, many of whom have not even decided how much money they have.

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