I know, I said I was done until I get to Puerto Rico, but I decided not to pass this one up. Also, it seems appropriate since, where I'm going, Christmas isn't that big a deal, but they take a couple weeks off to celebrate Three Kings Day (i.e., the whole friggin' twelve days). Of course, in Puerto Rico, almost anything is an excuse for a holiday--they celebrate both theirs and ours...

Chris Pellerito astutely notes that:

MSNBC cites a PNC Advisors' study suggesting that the cost of purchasing all the items in "The Twelve Days of Christmas" has risen 4.36% in the previous year. (This assumes that your true love gave you a partridge in a pear tree on each of twelve days, two turtle doves on each of eleven days, or twenty-two turtle doves total, etc.)

A couple of interesting observations -- first, the goods (five golden rings, etc.) increased in price faster than the services (maids-a-milking and the like.) This suggests that real wages, vis-a-vis the goods they can purchase, are falling. This is exactly how the economy "wrings out" a recession. Second, the golden rings increased the most in price -- beware of rising gold prices!

My question has always been: is "Lords-a-leaping" a good or a service? Not that it would seem to have a lot of value, at least to me, unlike maids-a-milking, which at least provides milk and ultimately other dairy products (though perhaps the cows are extra and not included, like batteries, or the wardrobe for Barbie or Jihad Joe...).

What I mean is, do you get to keep them and watch them leap in perpetuity (or until they get old and crippled, and you've fully depreciated them, and retired them or had them shot out of mercy or revolutionary vim), or do they just come in and leap for you until the Epiphany, and then go back to their various manor houses? Inquiring accountants and sales tax authorities are dying to know.

I'm also wondering if this can serve as a new surrogate for true inflation and as a general index of the economy. It could turn out to be as useful as the Economist's use of the Big Mac as a benchmark for exchange rates (as representative of purchasing power parity between different countries)...

Ahh, one of the evils of computers--they make it all too easy to do pointless statistics.