I created the chart using R and ggplot2. The full reproducible code is pasted in a following comment.

This post made me curious about how much you'd have to pay for each set of gift in The 12 Days of Christmas. Turns out PNC Bank tallies the prices every year. They make a few judgement calls, such as treating a "maid a-milking" as the cost of hiring a single individual at the federal minimum wage. Here's how PNC explains its methodology:

>

"The partridge and dove prices came from a national bird supplier. Hatcheries provided the cost of the hens and swans. The price of the geese came from a waterfowl farm. A national pet chain provided the price of the calling birds, or canaries. The pear tree price came from a Pennsylvania nursery. A national jewelry chain provided the cost of five 14-carat gold rings, and PHILADANCO, a modern dance company in Philadelphia, offered the price of ladies dancing, while Philadelphia Ballet supplied the cost of the Lords-a-Leaping. Maids-a-milking are the only unskilled laborers in the PNC CPI and, as such, they reflect the federal minimum wage. Year after year, the sources for the prices remain the same for the most part for consistency, but they have changed on occasion due to changes in the market or business landscape."

library(tidyverse)

price <- tibble(item_name = c("12 Partridges in a Pear Tree", "22 Turtle Doves", "30 French Hens",

"36 Calling Birds", "40 Gold Rings", "42 Geese a-Laying", "42 Swans a-Swimming",

"40 Maids a-Milking", "36 Ladies Dancing", "30 Lords a-Leaping",

"22 Pipers Piping", "12 Drummers Drumming"),

total_cost = c(3362.16, 6600, 3187.5, 5399.64, 9960, 5040, 78749.58, 290,

33232.48, 41940, 6042.8, 3266.93)) %>%

mutate(total_cost_rounded = scales::dollar(round(total_cost)))

price$item_name_ordered <-

ordered(price$item_name, levels = price$item_name)

ggplot(price, aes(x = item_name_ordered, y = total_cost, fill = "#D6001C")) +

geom_col() +

geom_label(aes(label = total_cost_rounded),

position = position_stack(

vjust = 0.5)) +

coord_flip() +

labs(

title = "Total cost of each gift in the song \"The 12 Days of Christmas\"",

y = "Total cost of each item in the United States in 2022",

x = NULL,

caption = "Created by TrueBirch using data from PNC's Christmas Price Index.

Total cost is the unit cost multiplied by number of times a gift is given."

) +

scale_y_continuous(label = scales::dollar) +

scale_fill_manual(values = "#D6001C") +

theme(

panel.grid.major = element_line(colour = "gray60"),

panel.grid.minor = element_line(colour = NA),

panel.grid.major.y = element_blank(),

panel.background = element_rect(fill = "#599C5D"),

plot.background = element_rect(fill = "gray93"),

legend.position = "none",

plot.title = element_text(size = 17),

plot.caption = element_text(size = 11),

axis.title = element_text(size = 13),

axis.text = element_text(size = 12),

strip.text = element_text(size = 12)

)

How are the lords/ladies/maids prices calculated? I'm assuming it's not slavery.

Also, how do swans cost ~1900 dollars? That can't be right.

Getting my credit card out for buying Swans!

According to PNC, "Hatcheries provided the cost of the hens and swans." Not sure the exact seller. This website suggests that some places charge even more.

I looked up the price of swans and the numbers that I got are way more than that. As it is swans a swimming. That means that they are hatched and not eggs. The least expensive that I could find was the white mute at $3,083 each with free shipping. That comes to $129,486. The ones I would rather have are the Australian Black Swans. Those come in at $6,500 each with a grand total of $273,000. Trumpeter Swans and Whooper Swans are even more.

Bet you didn't wake up this morning thinking you would know the price of a swan today

They may be the most expensive of this set of gifts, but definitely not the ultimate gift.

Swans are assholes.

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True, but I'd say that geese are even worse. Especially when protecting their eggs.

PNC cites "a national bird supplier" as its source without giving additional detail.

I see the gender pay gap is alive and well.

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But how are they more expensive than ladies dancing, or has the slave trade really collapsed in recent years?

Eew hardcodes

Easiest way to share code without any external dependencies

That's the cost of rental, not the cost of buying dancers

Can't you rent the swans then?

PNC sets the methodology. To be fair, they've kept it consistent over the years to enable year over year comparisons.

I've googled this song just now.

For me the original is from the custom Starcraft map I've launched over 10 years ago. It rocks.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eVSgyVz85MU

$250 for a gold ring? She's saying NO, buddy.

Also, "ladies" can be pretty status-neutral, but "Lords" isn't exactly ambiguous.

I find it hard to believe that you hiring titled nobility to dance for you comes that cheap. $1398 each? Since when did the aristocracy sell themselves for so little?

You need to own land to be a lord. According to preddit anyone can be a lady.

Not really a fan of the layout here. The box labels should be to the left of the bars or a different color. Since they are in the middle of the bar and same color, the data looks messy and unclear.

30 Lords cost more than 36 Ladies?

The patriarchy strikes again!

Gander pay gap

I call bullshit. How could you possibly get 40 maids a milking for only $290???

Everyone is assuming they were hired and not captured in battle.

While I agree your historic lords would be very pricy, there may be some budget options.

• Do people like Michael Flatley - “lord of the dance” count? Not sure what he’s doing now but might go for less than $2k
• What about drug lords?

If we’re going with more traditional titled options:

• There are about 785 lords in the UK parliament per a few websites, which seems like a lot so a few of them might go cheap
• Also you can apparently pay to “Become a Lord or Lady” by buying a presumed title for prices like £195. Not sure its very legally binding, but this seems like a cheap route

I don’t think it’s a diamond ring…

Swans would be difficult in the UK, the King owns them so it’ll be a name-your-price job

It is thought that this song originates in 1780, which is relative peace (12 years before french revolutionary wars)

Yea I wish I identified as a swan too

Inflation's really hit the swan market

I think its the total cost to hire Lorde to do one leap.

What about edge lords? Can pay them in Cheetos and Mountain Dew

I’ve never understood this person’s priorities. He seems really stuck on gifting birds. Who wants this many birds?

I’m really surprised that 40 gold rings would be less than 10 grand. Wouldn’t gold cost more than that?

Let’s get some gold necklaces for those swans.

how does it cost 33k to get 36 women to dance

It looks like they didn't include the cows, unless they assumed they were milking themselves.

I’m not sure how a colorblind person supposed to read this chart. It’s a big grey block. Please consider those with differences when choosing colors to mix together.

Lord's in the House of Lords get an allowance of £323 a day - just under $400. But many of them are doddery old buggars and I can't see many of them leaping.

I thought so too but it seems they did the math of 40 people working the federal minimum wage for an hour.. I dunno man, I’ve never heard of a maid willing to work for $7.25 an hour

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I bet they counted Jesus as one of lords and that's where they got the savings.

Interesting that you interpreted it as a cumulative gift, each verse being an additional X number of gifts. I wonder what the results would be if it was just the numbered amount of each gift.

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That's how I've always interpreted it, but it seems to be a steady belief that it adds to the qty with each run through of the verses. Makes no sense. The song is about giving gifts over a certain period of time, so how would each day happen multiple times, without time travel/manipulation.

Idk man, but that sure is a lot of ladies milking cows.

Best watch out, I'll milk your ladies.

In this weeks edition of The Writer's Thinly Disguised Fetish:

Damn, milkmaids are cheap these days.

146k a year?! Wtf

They hired undocumented maids-a-milking so they wouldn’t have to pay a living wage!

I have nipples, Greg…

Yes, very much so.

PNC Bank's annual report makes a lot of judgement calls. That's inevitable given the subject matter. I'll give them credit, though, since they keep their methodology consistent from year to year, which lets them accurately report the inflation.

Pretty sad how far the federal minimum wage is from a living wage. I don't know if $15 is the right number, but $7.25 is too damn low.

I actually agree with you. I saw this on my phone after posting it and realized I really should have used a different approach. I included my fully reproducible code if you want to give it a stab.

$15 isn't the right number because that's too damn low too. I remember reading a few months ago that if min wage kept pace with productivity since the 1960s it would be just over $20 now.

The song was written for the pidgeon lady in Home Alone 2.

lol idk anything about swan markets but anyone can beat that bid for 42 swans. You telling me I can't find a swan on the market for under 1k a swan when I'm buying at that scale??? lol - terrible, untrustworthy data.

I’m sorry I’m confused… what’s up with the numbers that are before each object? Like its 12 days of Christmas? Why is the lowest number 12? The song says FIVE golden rings not FORTY?!

Aka Totally Spies! ?

That's probably only on sitting days. Not sure how many there are but it would likely be under 100.

36k a year wtf?

I think 14carat gold plated rings can still be advertised as "gold rings." One of the properties of gold is that it can be hammered really thinly and still be useable, hence if you want to be cheap you just use a really thin layer. Edible gold leaf on desserts is a thing and actually isn't as expensive as you might guess due to the extreme thinness of the gold.

They seem to be hiring a dance company for just one performance.

also they seem to be purchasing the swans and other birds, but only hiring the human dancers and such for one performance only. I would think that you could make an arrangement to rent some swans, if you looked around, so it's not really a fair comparison of one performance versus unlimited ownership.

As PNC explains it in their calculations, "This represents the total cost of all the gifts bestowed by True Love when you count each repetition of the song, totaling 364 presents."

PNC makes some judgement calls to be sure. In their defense, they use the same methodology every year, so at least the numbers are consistent year-over-year.

You do understand when the song repeats a verse that it actually ISN’T an accumulation of past repetitions right?? That logic is so flawed.

Well if folks would quit oiling those majestic eggs up we'd be able to see more of the Pride of Ornithologists everywhere

I want 10 drug Lords a leaping, and I want them NOOOOOOWWWWW!!!!!

Each day they recite what was gifted to them. Each day they get all the gifts of the days before plus a new gift. So, for example, the first day you get a partridge. But on the second day you get two turtle doves and a partridge. So now you have 3 partridges and two turtle doves. Repeat as the days go up. So the total number of any given item will be equal to the number given times the result of 13 minus the day it was given, or Total = N(13-d). So golden rings is 5(13-5) which is 40. Partridges is 1(13-1) which equals 12. Etc etc.

Settle down Veruca

As someone who is intimately familiar with the trade of ornamental waterfowl I can tell you that those prices are much to high for swans and they would go for closer to 200-500 for a young bird and up to maybe 1200 for a mature breeder.

These numbers are inflated says this Zookeeper. But I've got a swan guy, so I'm all set either way.

I totally agree. This makes me want to close my pnc account.

Living wage varies from place to place. Some places in the US it probably is around $15/hour. Others may have living wages as high as $30/hour. What they should do is set the minimum wage based on a formula for local living costs.

Have geese ever drowned people?

https://abcnews.go.com/blogs/headlines/2012/04/killer-swan-blamed-for-mans-drowning

Ha, I wish I could! Sadly, I don’t know how to display data the way you’re doing it. I’m much more… vanilla in my skills lol. Just my opinion!

Go to the Public Garden in Boston, you can just take them and nobody says anything.

I encourage constructive feedback, so thank you. And don't bash your own skills. I started my journey in data science by reading Visualize This. Skip ahead a decade and I run data science for a corporation.

Some minimum wage jobs aren't designed to support someone living solo. I live in Washington DC, where the minimum wage is north of $16/hour. That makes sense here. But it's still not enough to buy a studio apartment.

The numbers come from PNC Bank. I used their numbers since they have a whole system put together.

PNC Bank uses the federal minimum wage to calculate the cost of an unskilled farm laborer. Sadly, some farm workers earn even less than that.

To me the song is cumulative considering the day is said at the beginning of each verse.

On the fourth day: four calling birds, three French hens...

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And swans cost nothing if you have the balls to catch them at the park.

OK, that makes sense. I remember learning that some of the properties that make Gold extremely valuable are it’s high ductility and malleability…. but that also allows it to be spread very thinly across cheaper materials!

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https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cLZR9IJqcgc&ab_channel=AnOldYoungGuy

Wow I thought the swan figure was bullshit until I looked it up

This is why it's horseshit to pick a number. Peg it to CPI and be done with it. Just like social security, Medicare etc.

I would like to see what the cost of these items would have been during the original time period of the song!

>On the first day of Christmas my true love sent to me >A partridge in a pear tree

>On the second day of Christmas my true love sent to me >Two turtle doves, >And a partridge in a pear tree.

>On the third day of Christmas my true love sent to me >Three French hens, >Two turtle doves, And a partridge in a pear tree.

How do you interpret that and NOT have it be cumulative?

This data is profoundly ugly

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the song doesn't say how long the maids were hired for, so the only way we can interpret being given any of the humans in the song is slavery. The prices for the birds aren't 1 hour of work, it's for ownership.

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Read the lyrics...

>On the first day of Christmas my true love sent to me A partridge in a pear tree

>On the second day of Christmas my true love sent to me Two turtle doves, And a partridge in a pear tree.

You're clearly getting both things on the second day. And so on as the days continue.

There's no time travel you're just getting duplicate gifts every following day.

Or the lyricist is just reiterating the gifts received on previous days.

Naw that “established titles” shit is a scam

I learned something today that I didn’t think I would but I now know that Swans are in fact more expensive than I thought, and golden rings are cheaper than I thought.

That would be a pretty weird way to use the word "and".

If they are milking themselves that would be a massive up charge. I don’t think you could find 40 women willing to do that for less than $100 an hour

There are a couple bigger issues at play here. Minimum wage was created to protect unskilled workers, keyword unskilled. The intention was you’d be able to develop valuable skills, increasing your value to the company, which results in a pay bump because capitalism pays off value added.

When these laws were created though they didn’t plan for mega corporations like Walmart and McDonald’s (you can only add so much value at a job that can be replaced by a computer who works for free) so people get stuck making an unlivable wage because they’re either 1. Too lazy or disinterested to invest in themselves or 2. Are so behind that they need to work crazy just to keep afloat.

I’d be surprised to see major change on the federal front because ya know lobbyists so who the fuck knows, soon we may not have a middle class.

self milking maids cost even more!

How can you calculate the cost of a Lord?

Cat milk

I seriously doubt that the writer of the song intended for repeat gifts, even though he/ she uses the word “and”. What other word would work as well and still keep the song “intact”?

If I gave my wife a puppy on day 1 and a ring on day 2. Well, I’m not also giving her a another puppy on day 2. Why would anyone think that, regardless of how I write it down?

I always assumed they said no to the gifts, so the true love takes the gift(s) back and returns with the same the next day and a new one added on.

Does that include the pear tree?

On the news today (aus) they are setting up a milk bank like the blood bank

So may not be that hard to do

Idk, this depends where you live… prices change based on location. Still a cool graph though

A feast with live music and dance performances. That's a really good gift.

If you hired 9 women to dance 4 times it would certainly not cost 33k what the hell ? If you find them randomly off the street and paid them 250 each it would only come up to 9k? How long are they dancing for? 5 hours? Jesus

I think you’re undershooting the cost of the top 5. Human trafficking ain’t cheap.

Call JG Wentworth, 877-LORD-NOW

I saw this once a many years ago and they used the partner billing rate for the law firm of Miles Lord, an attorney in MN. His firm was family run and they had multiple “Lords” on staff.

In my home state you’re actually allowed to kill swans on sight because they’re invasive and harmful to certain indigenous species.

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Who tf knew swans were that expensive. Google the price of a swan. $5249/ a pair....

Have I missed something? Where did the number of each of the gifts (not the cost) come from? I’m confused 😭

https://youtu.be/NQkF7fpw-wI

Nobody said they were lookers

Yeah, these numbers are WAY OFF

Also, a goose cost $120 each according to this graphic. I just searched it and it seems it's more like $30 a goose: https://www.metzerfarms.com/geese-for-sale.html?sort=price_asc

So perhaps this chart is not accurate.

Local radio station here in Hawaii does this. Every year they calculate the cumulative cost of all the gifts and they do it this way where everything is given multiple times so I've always thought that's how it was.

This is hilarious I love it

It doesn't look any better in color, trust me.

Sucks to be your wife with her one puppy.

I think you don't pay them directly. For that much money, you can throw a party good enough to attract nobility, and when they've had enough to drink, the lords will start dancing voluntarily.

Not if it’s simply a list of gifts given in prior days. I’ve always interpreted each verse as two separate thoughts: a gift given on a certain day followed by a listing of all prior gifts. I think this is plausible due to many of the singers’ renditions of this song vocally drawing out the current days gift, sometimes followed by a brief pause, and then running straight through the list of past gifts, as if keeping track or running tally.

Lol. Ironically, we actually have two puppies, thus defeating my own debate.

Better to have two puppies than to win a debate

We love those little floofs… so yeah, what debate?

>The least expensive that I could find was the white mute at $3,083 each with free shipping.

Not sure who your swan guy is, but if you get me $78,750, I'll get you 42 swans.

It is recalling the previous day's gifts, so you know just how amazing their true love is. If you didn't repeat them on subsequent days, no one would remember the pear tree by day 12.

>Also you can apparently pay to “Become a Lord or Lady” by buying a presumed title for prices like £195. Not sure its very legally binding, but this seems like a cheap route

Yes, and you can also have bridges and stars named after you, too. All of them are scams.

I want to call bullshit but I'm far too lazy to check these things so kudos

There was a tiny unimportant war that was happening during then. I don't think it amounted to much which is why it's not talked about.

If I said,

• "On day one I give you A
• On day two I give you A and B."

Then you would have 2A and 1B.

​

Otherwise I would say

• "On Day one I give you A.
• On Day two I give you B."

Then you would have 1A and 1B.

​

>Why would anyone think that, regardless of how I write it down?

Because words have largely agreed upon meanings and if you deviate from that meaning massively people don't understand you.

If you said to someone:

"On day one, I'm giving my gf a puppy, and on day 2 I'm giving her a puppy and a ring"

Then I'm certain almost all native English speakers would understand that you have given her a puppy on day one, and then another puppy and a ring on day two.

Why the hell are swans so expensive???

If it's not enough to get a studio apartment then it doesn't make sense

My maid service costs $40 an hour 🤔 that’s what I get for living in Seattle

Is the partridge including the cost of a pear tree? Mature fruit trees are quite expensive

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I would think that costs extra

How much are pear trees these days?

Gift: partridge in pear tree.

Number of times given: 12

Total number of partridges and pear trees: 12

Gift: five golden rings

Number of times given: 8

Total number of rings: 40

Uh, do you get to keep the maids a milking? Because at just over seven bucks apiece…

Swans are free, they are in the park and you can just take them.

Nobody will stop you

You are the worst person in this thread.

Why do people count each verse as incremental to the last one? It's just a list that is getting expanded. You don't make each verse additive.

When someone sings a love song, do you think each chorus is about a different lover?

They're pretty cheap nowadays. Members of the UK House of Lords don't even get a salary, just a £166/day attendance allowance and you only need 10 of them, which is like $2030...

PNC assumes that you pay each one minimum wage for an hour.

36 Women only costs less than 1k each? (Assuming that you're buying to own all of these)

If they were milking themselves I believe it would be more expensive than using a cow

Good point, PNC should add that expense

I like the idea but this is unpleasant to look at.

The amount of Red and Green is a bit much.

I think this is one red/green chart where being colourblind might be advantageous.

The labels being all over the place.

Labels hiding the data!

Axis repeating the title.

I actually agree with you. I was going for a Christmas theme and it really didn't work out. Normally I'm very restrained in my use of color, and I think I'll go back to that aesthetic.

I also looked at it on my phone after making the post and realized it's hard to read on mobile. I could have dropped the on-bar labels without losing any data, and I could have made it narrower and longer for mobile-friendliness.

Slave wages

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Bruh it’s not a voucher to go see some people milking cows somewhere. You have to transport 40 women cows and buckets to your house in order to present them as a gift. That means a bus for the maids, trucks for the cows, and a serious amount of planning.

Right? I understand that the red and green is festive, but my poor eyeballs.