Christmas Price Index chose the items in the popular Christmas carol "The Twelve Days of Christmas" as its market basket: a partridge in a pear tree, two turtle doves, three French hens, four calling birds, five gold(en) rings, six geese, seven swans, eight maids, nine dancing ladies, ten leaping lords, eleven pipers, and twelve drummers. According to tradition, the purchasing of the items begins on December 26 and ends on January 6. PNC compiles both a "Christmas Price Index" and "The True Cost of Christmas." The "Christmas Price Index" is calculated by adding the cost of the items in the song. The "True
The Hundred Pipers contemporary publications post reviews of her performance of the song in the capital; and she published the song with her own (and the now standard) musical arrangement in 1852. The song does not date from the Jacobite period, as is the case with many others now considered in the "classic canon of Jacobite songs", most of which were songs "composed in the late eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, but were passed off as contemporary products of the Jacobite risings." The tune has not been satisfactorily traced, and though it is indexed in the "Lays" as "Hundred Pipers", no such air is