Dec 2024
It’s the most wonderful time of the year! That time of the year to panic-buy whatever seems vaguely appropriate for our loved ones. But consider this: you could give that special someone a truly unforgettable holiday via the hottest gift guide of the 1700s: The Twelve Days of Christmas. You could win Christmas. But at what (dollar-denominated) cost?
A partridge in a pear tree
Everybody likes pears, apple’s hot cousin. A modest 5-gallon pear tree is about $65. Not bad. Consulting my local partridge hatchery, I’ve been informed that a partridge chick will run me $3. Great! However: you must order 50 chicks minimum. Not great! Setting aside what I’m going to do with the other 49 juvenile partridges, that’s a total poultry cost of $150.
Two turtle doves
More birds! Let me just call out right now that the author of this particular carol is a bird pervert. It’s birds non-stop until the fifth day of Christmas. Also: turns out we don’t get turtle doves in North America, but I dare you to point out a turtle dove in a lineup of doves. A couple of workaday doves is $100, apparently. I’m no ornithologist but it feels like the dove farm is ripping me off (or the partridge hatchery needs to raise their prices).
Three french hens
Subbing in ‘three hens of no particular nationality’ here. Apologies to my true love, but shipping hens in from France feels like a stretch for the third day. Much like partridges, you can buy chickens for basically nothing but you need to buy twenty-five chicks. At $3 a pop, that’s a cool $75. The hatchery also highlights that the variety of hen I’ve selected produces large breast, thigh, and leg meat. I’ll be sure to pass that along on Christmas morning.
Four calling birds
Obviously I want to get my true love the callingest bird possible, which turns out to be the white bellbird. Its calls can exceed 120 dB, which is the same loudness as a gunshot. The gift of tinnitus! Sadly, the white bellbird is native to the Amazon, which makes it very difficult to procure. Locally, one of the loudest birds is the sandhill crane. Obtaining a crane seems to be possible on quasi-legal bird-trading sites, alas, the only price I’ve found for a crane of any type so far is $4,200. Four cranes would thus be $16,800. Oof. I hope my true love appreciates this.
Five golden rings
Buddy I can get you five golden rings in like 5 minutes tops. A solid(?) gold(?) ring(?) off AliExpress will run me $14 × 5 = $70, shipping included. Easy peasy.
Six geese a-laying
And just like that, more birds. There are many breeds of goose to consider, and some of them have very good names. I have selected the ‘Buff Toulouse’, which, aside from sounding like a 1900s Parisian circus strongman, are $300 (for 6). I was hoping for hen prices after those spendy calling birds, but beggars can’t be choosers.
Seven swans a-swimming
Ducks I could swing no problem, but SWANS? Forget it, back to the bird exchange dark web. The cheapest bottom of the barrel clapped-out swans are running about $500 per bird. Seven? That’ll be $3,500. I want to make sure those swans are indeed a-swimming, so I’ll also throw in an inflatable pool at a cost of $54.99.
Eight maids a-milking
Monster.com (keyword: milking) suggests that dairy farming is minimum-wage work, previous dairy and machinery experience is an asset but not required, must provide own transportation. Given that neither I nor my true love owns a dairy farm, this is likely to be more of a gig – let’s call it a couple of hours, at best. So: $16.55 (local minimum wage as I write this very important document) times eight maids times 2 hours = $264.80. But it’s not just maids, it’s maids a-milking. Did you know you can rent a cow? I found one company offering a ‘cow experience’ at $200/cow. It’s clearly absurd for the maids to milk in shifts (gotta get my money’s worth!), so I need eight.
Nine ladies dancing
The carol doesn’t specify what kind of dancing, so I’m going to book this Hawaiian dance company that’s close to my house – $300 for a 30-45 minute show. They claim “We do birthdays, kids' parties, corporate events, senior homes, fundraisers and more”, but has anyone ever booked them for one-twelfth of a Christmas carol before? I’m just saying, you want this $300 or not?
Ten lords a-leaping
We can probably just reason this one out: if a lord is somewhere between a total scrub and His Majesty The King, so too should his day rate be similarly averaged. The average UK salary (as of this writing) is £34,963, and the king receives an annual stipend of £124.8m. Setting aside the troubling income inequality, we need to consider that there’s one king and about 67 million Brits. The King’s salary is a statistical blip at that level, so we can probably entice some down-on-their-luck lords with a standard per diem. The gov.uk website suggests a rate of £46 per day for less than 5 hours, which this certainly would be, so I’ve got a (painful GBP to CAD) outlay of $782. There’s also the question of getting ten lords across the pond. Current Heathrow to Toronto (return) flights are $2,000 a head, so let’s be charitable and assume I get a 10% discount for group travel, that's $18,000.
Eleven pipers piping
I bet there’s a 23-piece band that I can book to check off pipers and drummers in one fell swoop. Twenty-three is a normal number of members for a band to have, right? Which takes us to:
Twelve drummers drumming
I found a very helpful thread on Reddit about booking musicians, which suggests that it’s easier to book 23 musicians and just have them all show up at once, rather than try to rent out my local orchestra. Fair enough! Seems like I’m also going to need to book a musical director so my eleven-piper twelve-drummer band has some coherence and, dare I say it, swing. I’ll need to slap down about $3,260 to make this happen, going by local rates.
Toting this all up, I’m faced with a cost of $45,321.79. Spread over the titular twelve days, that’s still a hefty bill of $3,776.82 per day. I think I’ll just get my true love some socks.