Every year around Christmas the news cycle slows down, and we start to see the usual repeated articles: “Holiday travelers expect delays”, “Holiday foods that will kill your pets.”, “You are going to get fat”, and “Poor people are poor, and this is the time of year you should think about them”.
But there has always been one article that has bothered me. The annual: “How much the items listed in the song ’12 Days of Christmas’ would cost this year?” article.
This is a stupid thing to do, because most of these gifts you can’t buy. Where are you going to find “10 lords a leaping” outside of a gay porno set? Or “8 maids-a-milking” out side of an even stranger porno set?
In fact, the only real gift in the whole list is “5 gold rings” which is a great gift, if you are a Mafia don.
You know what Christmas song has real gifts, and you can find current prices for?
You got it: “Santa Baby: A greedy bitch’s Christmas list for Santa""Santa Baby". Originally sung by cabaret legend Eartha Kitt, it has become a Christmas staple, and has been covered by artists as diverse as Mae West, Madonna and Taylor Swift. Heck, even Les Paul did a cover.
The song, if you aren’t familiar with it (likely an impossibility) is a girl with very luxurious tastes dictating to Santa how good she has been, and therefore she deserves a very expensive Christmas.
First on her list: A sable, which if you don’t know is an animal similar to a mink that is made into coats. And very pricey: $35,000 for the only one I was able to find that was real.
A 1954 convertible, light blue is second up. A look on eBay brought up a nice light blue 1954 Corvette, with a heavy price: $69,000. 45 seconds into the song, and we are already over $100,000.
Now that she has land transportation down, time to move onto the high seas in a yacht. I figure she would want a luxury yacht, but I imagine that would be a bit much, as I doubt she would do much more than cruise around a harbor. A woman who wants to wear a sable isn’t going to be sailing to Tahiti, so I figure a cruising yacht, about 65’ in length would suffice, though with a luxury interior. The average cost I found was $2.1million. Makes the car seem like a drop in the water, and brings us to $2.2 million about 1 minute into the song.
I am going to skip ahead now to the duplex. I figure that she doesn’t mean the 2 unit houses that are common in the east coast and Midwest, but a type of expensive property in Manhattan. Estimates of the average sale price in NYC are around $2.3 million dollars.
We are now up to 4.5 million dollars, so this chick better have been really good. She also is apparently to lazy to actually decorate her tree because she asks for Santa to decorate her tree, with Tiffany ornaments. No IKEA ornaments for her I suppose. I was actually surprised to find out that Tiffany actually sold ornaments. They run from 30 dollars to 225 bucks. Using my calculus skills, I determined the median to be around 100 dollars. My wife and I hang about 80 ornaments on our tree, so $8,000, and the cheapest of the gifts.
I figure, if Santa is stopping by Tiffany, he might as well pick up her next request there as well, a ring. I imagine that she means a diamond ring. 1.5kt is a pretty good size, and the cheapest I have seen on Tiffany starts at $17,800
We are now at $4,525,800 for the easy to acquire (but a little hard to fit in the sleigh) gifts.
I skipped ahead a bit because of the most absurd request in the song. The deed to a platinum mine. Mines are usually owned by large conglomerates like Rio Tinto, or Union Carbide. There is no way I thought that I could find the cost of a platinum mine. But I Googled it anyway, and lo and behold, a lovely site that not only yields platinum, but gold. Cost? $2.25 million dollars.
So all together we get a grand total of:
$6,775,800
Hope Santa didn't have his money handled by Madoff.
