Home
/
RELIGION & LIBERTY ONLINE
/
The cost of Twelve Days of Christmas: $34,363.49
The cost of Twelve Days of Christmas: $34,363.49
Oct 29, 2025 11:53 AM

If you’ve been stuck at the mall listening to a song about ten Lords a-Leaping and eight Maids a-Milking you can blame the Jesuits.

Rumor has it they invented the Twelve Days of Christmas song as a catechism in code for persecuted Catholics in 16th-century England. The claim is that each of the items has a coded meaning (Old and New Testaments are the two turtle doves; three hens are the Wise Men; the Evangelists are the four calling birds; five gold rings speak of the five sacraments that should be received by all Catholics, etc.).

Whether that is true or not we’ll leave to the musicologists to decide. Since this is an economics blog will look at another question: How much would all that stuff cost?

For more than 30 years, the financial pany PNC has calculated the prices of the twelve gifts for their PNC Christmas Price Index.

The cost of the items for the 2016 season are $34,363.49. But that’s only if you bought the items once. If you consider the cumulative cost of all the gifts when you count each repetition in the song (364 gifts) you’d spend $156,507.88.

Surprisingly, the seven Swans-a-Swimming are the most expensive item ($13,125) and the most subject to fluctuation. If you take them out, the cost is only $21,238.49.

The PNC Christmas Price Index may seem silly, but it has some educational value since it’s similar to the U.S. Consumer Price Index, which measures the changing prices of goods and services like housing, food, clothing, transportation and more that reflect the spending habits of the average American. “It’s a fun way to measure consumer spending and trends in the economy,” says PNC. “So, even if Pipers Piping or Geese-a-Laying didn’t make your gift list this year, you can still learn a lot by checking out why their prices have increased or decreased over the years.”

Comments
Welcome to mreligion comments! Please keep conversations courteous and on-topic. To fosterproductive and respectful conversations, you may see comments from our Community Managers.
Sign up to post
Sort by
Show More Comments
RELIGION & LIBERTY ONLINE
Should morality be legislated?
An act’s immorality is not sufficient to justify prohibition or regulation through state coercion. A moral government aimed at mon good will recognize its basic purpose, scope, and limitations. Read More… Should governments legislate morality? It depends on how we define our terms. If “legislate morality” is simply defined as “making laws that are moral,” then it is obvious that we should legislate morality. But if “legislate morality” entails basing laws solely on an act’s morality or immorality, then we...
Freedom and free stuff: How prudence preserves liberty
Is it possible for a government to respect economic freedom while also playing a more or less significant role in providing certain material goods to its citizens? Prudence provides an answer. Read More… What is the relationship between freedom and government redistribution? Can the two coexist? Some believe there is a negative correlation between the two because free economies are often associated with less government intervention. Others might argue that freedom and significant state intervention go hand in hand, because...
Sri Lanka’s organic farming mandate leads to food shortage, economic emergency
One needn’t take a position on organic farming to see the folly in Sri Lanka’s decision. This is a classic case of fatal conceits run amok — of lofty ideas and one-dimensional strategies that hold little regard for localized knowledge and plexity of the human person. Read More… In April, the Sri Lankan government banned the import and use of fertilizers and agrochemicals, including insecticides and herbicides, marking a significant step in their goal to e the world’s first country...
Hong Kong officials pressure journalism group to reveal list of members
The public pressure placed on the Hong Kong Journalists’ Association is the latest in Hong Kong’s crackdown on freedoms of press and speech. Since the city’s implementation of the National Security Law, or NSL, in June 2020, the media industry has been continually critiqued and crippled by the city’s leaders. Read More… On Sept. 15, Hong Kong’s Secretary of Security, Chris Tang, called for the Hong Kong Journalists’ Association, the city’s main press group, to reveal to the public who...
Hong Kong journalists tell ABC they ‘fear for their lives’ because of communist Chinese power grab
“The NSL [is] the biggest damage to the whole industry,” former Apple Daily journalist Elvin Yu told ABC. “Nobody is safe.” Read More… Hong Kong pro-democracy news service Apple Daily shut its doors on June 24, but the ripple effects from the Chinese Communist Party’s attack on the free press continue to reverberate. Seven former Apple Daily employees have been charged under the city’s National Security Law, or NSL, which bans what the government deems to be acts of secession,...
With the ‘new Taliban’ now in power, can we expect anything different?
To fully understand the impact and future of Taliban, it is crucial to be cognizant of the varieties of Taliban and the power dynamics among their extremist rivals, such as al-Qaeda and ISK. Read More… The dramatic return of the Taliban to Kabul has consequences beyond the borders of Afghanistan. The Taliban are not the most popular group in Afghanistan but they certainly are the most feared, with enough force at their disposal to impose their dogmatic version of Islam...
Freedom and Truth: Reflections on what we’ve learned from 9/11
Freedom, as indispensable as it is, is not sufficient for constructing the quality of society and culture appropriate to man, his dignity, and his capacity. It must be a freedom oriented to something beyond itself, as we have said so many times, oriented to truth: the truth of man’s origin, the truth of man’s nature, and the truth of man’s destiny. Read More… It feels strange to type that it’s been 20 years since 9/11. What happened 20 years ago...
The impact of church attendance on child development and family life
Religious attendance is critical not only in the development and raising of children, but for society as a whole. Read More… Only 47% of Americans belong to a church of any faith. This matters, especially for families and children, as well as munities, as church attendance and religious adherence not only benefit family life, but also the development of children, as both church and a strong family life positively form children and help them e productive members of society. For...
‘Win-win denial’: The roots of zero-sum thinking
A new study shows that zero-sum thinking is pervasive across society, with roots in the ways we tend to think about our neighbors and the economy. Read More… One of the basic insights of economics is that trade is mutually beneficial, making both parties better off than they were before. It’s a proposition about human exchange that stretches back to Adam Smith’s foundational treatise, “The Wealth of Nations.” “Man has almost constant occasion for the help of his brethren, and...
9 Hong Kong activists sentenced to 10 months over participation in Tiananmen Square Massacre vigil
The sentences are the latest in the Chinese Communist Party’s, or CCP’s, relentless pursuit of absolute control, which simultaneously smothers any hint of dissent, including freedoms of speech and assembly. Read More… Nine Hong Kong pro-democracy activists were sentenced Sept. 15 to 10 months in prison for their participation in the annual vigil for memoration of the Tiananmen Square Massacre. Twelve defendants total pled guilty earlier this month to their involvement in the vigil memorates the 1989 Tiananmen Square Massacre,...
Related Classification
Copyright 2023-2025 - www.mreligion.com All Rights Reserved