Posted by andy kiang under
Music [4] Comments
That’s right, it’s Christmas again.
A while ago (in the summer at some point) i was thinking about the song The Twelve Days Of Christmas and, thinking briefly about the numbers involved, it struck me how impractical the whole thing is.
There are sources to say that the whole thing is a religious allegory and not to be taken literally (like The Voice and carols.org), others find more literal meanings (like brownielocks.com) but this didn’t dissuade me from doing some number crunching.
By the twelfth day of Christmas, the donor (henceforth referred to as True Love) would have generously donated to the recipient (henceforth referred to as Me) the following:

A Partridge In A Pear Tree
12 partridges in 12 pear trees
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 and
12 drummers drumming
This equates to a total of 376 gifts comprising of 184 animals, 140 humans, 40 items of jewellery and 12 plants. (I have taken the cumulative values, as True Love repeatedly donates them per verse.)

Go Rin No Sho (The Book Of Five Rings)
Thinking i was particularly clever, i endeavoured to find out the total retail value of these gifts, based on the values they would have held in the 16th century in England, where the song is rumoured to have originated, then converting it to today’s value based on inflation. (The song is also rumoured to be French but this is a UK blog and there are only so many wrong trees i can bark up in one go.)
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