Wednesday, December 12, 2012

The Official NORAD Santa Tracker

Did you know on Christmas Eve you can track Santa's progress to see where in the world he is flying and delivering toys?!  Well you can!!  NORAD has a special website just for him!

It's not quite Christmas yet so the site have activities and things you can play around with in the mean time.

Check it out HERE.


Merry Santa Tracking!!!


Signing off 12:38

Wednesday, December 5, 2012

Totaling the 12 Days Of Christmas gifts....

EVERYONE knows the song the 12 Days of Christmas.

This blog has to do with just that.

The song.

First I will start out with a little history on the song and then I will get to my point.  Y'all know how much I love Wikipedia!  A search on Wikipedia found an article describing the background on the 12 Days of Christmas song here.  If you want to read the whole article there that's all well and good but the first section is pasted below for easy reference:

Origin

The twelve days in the song are the twelve days starting Christmas Day, or in some traditions, the day after Christmas (December 26) (Boxing Day or St. Stephen's Day, as being the feast day of St. Stephen Protomartyr) to the day before Epiphany, or the Feast of the Epiphany (January 6, or the Twelfth Day). Twelfth Night is defined by the Oxford English Dictionary as "the evening of the fifth of January, preceding Twelfth Day, the eve of the Epiphany, formerly the last day of the Christmas festivities and observed as a time of merrymaking."
Although the specific origins of the chant are not known, it possibly began as a Twelfth Night "memories-and-forfeits" game, in which a leader recited a verse, each of the players repeated the verse, the leader added another verse, and so on until one of the players made a mistake, with the player who erred having to pay a penalty, such as offering up a kiss or a sweet. This is how the game is offered up in its earliest known printed version, in the children's book Mirth without Mischief (c. 1780) published in England, which 100 years later Lady Gomme, a collector of folktales and rhymes, described playing every Twelfth Day night before eating mince pies and twelfth cake.
The song apparently is older than the printed version, though it is not known how much older. Textual evidence indicates that the song was not English in origin, but French, though it is considered an English carol. Three French versions of the song are known. If the "partridge in a pear tree" of the English version is to be taken literally, then it seems as if the chant comes from France, since the red-legged (or French) partridge, which perches in trees more frequently than the native common (or grey) partridge, was not successfully introduced into England until about 1770.

This leads up to the info that I found online yesterday.  Someone took the time to total up the prices for all the gifts given in that song based on today's prices.  They even gave a comparison figure based on last year's prices.  The prices in the list are only for 1 "set" of gifts as the link here explains.  The whole package with all 364 gifts at today's prices would be around $107,300.24 Yikes!

As promised here is the list (I added the pictures):



Prices of items in the Christmas song “The Twelve Days of Christmas,” according to PNC Wealth Management:


- Partridge, $15; last year: same




- Pear tree, $189.99; last year: 169.99


- Two turtle doves, $125; last year: same


- Three French hens, $165; last year: $150


- Four calling birds (canaries), $519.96; last year: same




- Five gold rings, $750; last year: $645


- Six geese a-laying, $210; last year: $162



- Seven swans a-swimming, $7,000; last year: $6,300


- Eight maids a-milking, $58; last year: same


- Nine ladies dancing (per performance), $6,294; last year: same


- 10 lords a-leaping (per performance), $4,767; last year: same


- 11 pipers piping (per performance), $2,562; last year: $2,428


- 12 drummers drumming (per performance), $2,776; last year: $2,630



What I want to know is where the hell did she PUT all this stuff?!

I hope you have a happy holiday, no matter what you celebrate!

Signing off 09:45