There’s nothing practical about the gifts from the Twelve Days of Christmas—just how often do you really need lords a-leaping? But have you ever considered the tax implications? (No. We realize that the answer is no.)
Let’s remedy that by taking a look at the list, in declining order:
12 Drummers Drumming
In India, local government officials dispatch drum bands to the businesses of those in arrears on their taxes in an attempt to shame the owners into payment.
11 Pipers Piping
You’re off to hear a holiday woodwind ensemble, but you’re vexed by the question of whether your concert ticket is subject to sales tax. The answer: it depends. In some states, concerts are considered educational events and therefore potentially exempt from the sales tax.
10 Lords A-Leaping
The peerages must be in really bad shape if the lords are leaping to make a quick buck, but in Nevada under the state’s old Live Entertainment Tax, you might have been in luck. The 10% tax was not imposed if the entertainment in question was provided by employees who only occasionally served as entertainers.
9 Ladies Dancing
These nine ladies were likely performers sponsored by a guild. These guilds originally came into being largely as a response to arbitrary taxation in a time when feudal lords had nearly unfettered authority to levy taxes on trade within their fiefs.
8 Maids A-Milking
Let’s talk about the preferential treatment of dairy cattle in the tax code, shall we? In a county in Alberta, Canada, ranchers feuded with local government over a $3 per head tax on large beef cattle operations. Dairy cattle, however, were exempt. Virginia has similar issues.
7 Swans A-Swimming
Swans are notoriously territorial, especially if you have nesting pairs, so if you expect seven swans to swim peacefully, you need an awfully big lake. And large lakes typically mean high property tax assessments, leading to a bill you might regret if your investments are ever wiped out by a “black swan” event.
6 Geese A-Laying
Are these wild geese? Because if so, you might just qualify for Texas’s wildlife tax exemption.
5 Gold(en) Rings
In 1991, the U.S. adopted a 10 percent luxury tax on a range of luxury goods, including jewelry priced in excess of $10,000. After disappointing revenues and a major hit to certain industries, Congress reversed itself two years later.
4 Calling Birds
We need to address a misconception here. The song isn’t actually speaking of “calling” birds, but “colly birds,” which is to say blackbirds. These birds, though not as regal as pheasants, were consumed as a delicacy (remember the blackbirds baked in a pie?), so check to see if your jurisdiction imposes a meals tax.
3 French Hens
Overdoing it a bit on the birds, aren’t we? The thing is, these French hens might actually be roosters, since the Latin word for France (Gaul, from Gallia) is very close to the word for rooster. The historian Procopius claimed that the last emperor of the western Roman Empire, told by a eunuch that Rome had fallen, wept bitterly, thinking the messenger was referring to his prize rooster of that name, but cheered up when he learned that it was only the city that had perished. Incidentally, it has often been argued that ruinous taxation precipitated the final collapse of the Western Empire.
2 Turtle Doves
More birds, probably symbolizing fertility or love or maybe just the poet’s maddening obsession with birds. Doves, according to lore, mate for life, making them a fitting symbol of marriage. A less romantic symbol of marriage is the extra income tax married couples owe at the federal level and in states which, by failing to double bracket widths for joint filers, impose a “marriage penalty.”
1 Partridge in a Pear Tree
All these birds are getting tiring, so let’s talk about the pear tree. In 1944, the Soviet Union burdened its already downtrodden farmers with a punitive tax on fruit trees. As a result, weary farmers felled their trees to avoid paying the tax.
One more thing: we as a society have the twelve days of Christmas all wrong, and I don’t just mean in our failure to associate them with tax policy. The twelve days are not a countdown to Christmas Day, but rather from it. Christmas Day is actually the first day of Christmastide or Twelvetide, a twelve-day season culminating in the straightforwardly-named Twelfth Night (think Shakespeare) on the eve of Epiphany. So if you haven’t ordered those colly birds for your true love’s Twelfth Night pie yet, don’t worry, there’s still plenty of time!
Excerpt from the Tax Foundation blog http://taxfoundation.org/blog/taxing-review-twelve-days-christmas
