I don’t recall if I ever for real, real believed in Santa Claus because I don’t remember realizing I’d been lied to. I do remember us being told to write letters to him in elementary school and he never wrote back. Also, that some folks who deserved coal, like Ms. Askew, never got it, so the story never lined up for me.
I’ve been listening to our “She Sings | The Winter Holidays” playlist at lot. On it, Eartha Kitt sings “Santa Baby.” It’s a vibe, but the more I listen to the playlist, the more I find myself humming it. I don’t really like it, but I am intrigued. Besides Kitt’s unsettling baby-voice, super-sexy purring, the song is just absurd.
Putting myself in Kitt’s Manolos (don’t you think she wore Manolos?), my sensibilities jet back about three-quarters of a century, as if I’m making a dowry list for my gold-digging parents and adding a little something in for myself while I’m at it. I’ve added up Eartha’s outlandish list of Christmas demands (and mine) for a whopping grand total. Let’s see what we get.
Don’t tell anyone, but I kind of love fur. It’s supposed to be bad, I know, but it’s just so luxe. And sable? Oh my! So I found this sable short coat at Henig Furs that I’d totally wear, if I didn’t have to pay rent, student loans, utilities, mobile phone, car insurance, etc. … and, perhaps, if I lived in Alaska. It’s $25,000.
I do love a vintage car. When Eartha’s song was released (1953), the convertible wasn’t vintage; it would have been brand new. My mom and I assumed Kitt was referencing a Cadillac because that was the thing then, and another Christmas song she released (that flopped) affirmed that. A mint condition ’54 blue convertible Cadillac (though I’d prefer black) would set Santa back $85,000. And good luck finding one.
One of my friends and her husband vacationed on a yacht in Spain for their anniversary. That’s probably the closest I’ll ever get to a yacht. Choosing one was cool, though; I was quite modest at $7.9 million with Fraser, but you get what you pay for.
The “platinum mine” request was super tricky. Google “price of a platinum mine” and you don’t readily find an answer. Thankfully, I have a friend who does commodity trading and nerds out on things like this. The day I set out to write this, the price of one Troy ounce of platinum is $965. In December of 2016, South African Sibanye Gold bought North American palladium and platinum-mining Stillwater Mining Company for $2.2 billion. In my friend’s explanation, there were words, more words, and then a figure of $624 million and a final determination that it would be safe to say a single mine would probably cost about $1.5 billion. So, year, there’s that. If you disagree, take it up with him.
A duplex is something I can handle. I figured I’d take liberties and do two things: get property and then make it work for me. With that, I chose to get a condo in Starkville near Mississippi State’s campus. That could make us some good AirBnB money, barring another modern plague. $471,000.
Kitt said she wanted three checks. She didn’t designate an amount. She probably wanted blank checks, but that doesn’t work for calculating, so I decided we’d get three checks at $25,000 apiece. $75,000.
This one requires some finagling too, but unlike the platinum mine, it’s right up my alley. Eartha said she (we) wanted to trim the tree with ornaments from Tiffany & Co. Ye average O’ Tannenbaum is 7.5 feet tall; for that to be completely covered, according to interior designers, we’d need about 300 ornaments of varying size. On average, a blue-box-company ornament is $200. That costs a cool $60,000.
Lastly, a ring. If someone gives you this much stuff, they’re already thinking they own you, but you may as well play into the sham and go for diamonds. Let’s not go white, though. Don’t want to have anyone think the rock is a CZ. Ten carats of yellowish brown diamond. Don’t want to break the bank either, I guess. $81,000.
The grand total is a whopping $1,508,697,000. And folks on Twitter complaining about $200 dates. Chile, puh-leez.
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