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"Fiiiiive Goooold Riiiiings..."
PNC Bank has once again released their annual Christmas Price Index (CPI) detailing the costs of the gifts in the classic song, "The Twelve Days of Christmas". This year the song narrator's "true love" would need to spend $24,263.18 to purchase all twelve gifts. That's a 3.5% increase from last year's prices.
The year's most expensive gifts are the Seven Swans-a-Swimming and the Nine Ladies dancing at $6,300 and $6,294.03 respectively. The swans rose 12.5% from last year's price while the dancing ladies remained constant.
Eight Maids-a-Milking are once again the lowest priced item at only $58. As their salary is dictated by minimum wage, their price has remained steady for a few years.
The largest price increase this year was seen by the Two Turtle Doves. Their price increased 25% from $100 to $125. A few of the gifts saw no increase in price, while two actually decreased. Four Calling Birds are now 13.3% cheaper than they were a year ago and you can even save a modest 0.8% on those five flashy Gold Rings.
PNC also calculates what they call the "True Cost of Christmas". This is the cumulative costs of all the gifts when you count each repetition in the song. For only $101,119.84 you can have 42 Swans-a-Swimming, 36 French Hens, and enough drummers, pipers, leaping lords, and dancing ladies to have a pretty wild party.
As PNC is a Pennsylvania based bank, a good portion of their "shopping" is done in the state. The National Aviary in Pittsburgh provides prices for the partridge, doves, geese, and swans. Waterloo Gardens, a Philadelphia nursery, provided the cost of the pear tree. The price for Nine Ladies Dancing was given by Philadanco, a modern dance company in Philadelphia. The Pennsylvania Ballet priced the Lords-a-Leaping and a Pennsylvania musician's union made available the costs for the Pipers Piping and Drummers Drumming.
To see the full list of gift prices and to explore an interactive site dedicated to the CPI, visit www.pncchristmaspriceindex.com.
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