By Lester Holt, NBC News anchor

Good afternoon from New York. Brian is taking the Christmas week off and I will be here in his place.

The streets around our Rockefeller Center studios are jammed with shoppers, perhaps validating the predictions that a lot of the money spent on this season will be spent at the last minute. Every year it seems there is an obsession with how well retailers will do each Christmas, but this season there is a strong belief the holiday sales numbers will tell us whether we are headed into, or perhaps already in, a recession. The first report on this weekend's sales figures is coming out late this afternoon and we will be reporting those numbers tonight on Nightly News.

The frenzied political campaign took a breath on this Christmas eve. Republican candidate Rudy Giuliani paid his annual visit to Hale House, a children and family services institution in Harlem, where he tried to clarify lingering questions about his health. For the first time the former mayor declared unequivocally that he did not have cancer, while promising his physician will have more to say later in the week. NBC's John Yang will have a lot more on how questions over Giuliani's health have dogged his campaign since he was rushed to a St. Louis hospital last week.

We're also looking at Christmas through the eyes of Christians in Iraq and China, and at the life of jazz legend Oscar Peterson who has died at the age of 82.

I hope you can join us tonight for NBC Nightly News. Best wishes for a safe and happy Christmas.