What’s the cost of true love at Christmastime?  According to the English carol ‘The Twelve Days of Christmas’ and the financial experts at PNC Bank in Pittsburg, it is $39,094.  That’s up just 1.2% from last year, according to their annual study.

They’ve done the ‘True Cost of Christmas’ analysis each year back to the 1980s.  They somehow research each of the 12 items mentioned in the song, although I’m sure not everything is available on Amazon.com.  Every December they report out the cost for that year as a sort of holiday consumer price index.

• 5 Golden Rings fell -9.1% from last year as gold continued to depreciate
• 7 Swans-A-Swimming are the most expensive thing on the list ($13K)
• For just $1.8K, you can get all of the other birds, except the expensive Swans.  That includes the Partridge, Turtle Doves, French Hens, Calling Birds, & Geese-A-Laying.
• The Geese went up +8.3% from last year – the most inflation of the group
• 8 Maids-A-Milking are the cheapest – it’s a minimum wage job – for just $58
• Lord-A-Leaping are ~25% more expensive ($10K) than Ladies Dancing ($7.6K), even though there are only 1 more of them (10 Lords vs 9 Ladies)
• Musicians (Pipers Piping & Drummers Drumming) are much cheaper than the dancing Lords & Ladies: Just $3.0K for the 12 Drummers & $2.8K for the 11 Pipers.
• The musicians are up +3.5% from last year, which is pretty good wage growth
• If you count all of the repetitions in the song as individual gifts, you are pushing $170,609 to cover the cost of them all.

According to data from the bank’s survey, since 1985 the annual inflation has only been about 1.8%.  That compares to about 2.2% inflation over the same period.  I guess you can say that true love is expensive at Christmastime, but not as expensive as everything else in life!

Here is a link to the full PNC Christmas Price Index Study

Merry Christmas & Best Wishes For Everyone Still Shopping This Weekend!

Image Credit: PNCBank.com