...and a partridge in a pear tree

Thanks to a Sussex-based dot.com, festive shoppers on the hunt for gifts can now buy the presents from the Twelve Days Of Christmas song on one web site.

Whether anyone would actually thank a true love for filling up their living room with a total of 23 ornamental birds, an octet of udder-squeezing women, a frenzy of 19 aristocratic leapers and dancers and a cacophony of 23 people piping and drumming is questionable - although the gold rings might go down a bit better.

Beverley Brown, founder of shopping web site TheSimpleSaver.com, decided to look into the gifts from the Christmas song and find out where to buy them.

She discovered in total the set of 78 presents would cost £9,651.87, with the 12 drummers drumming at £2,000 and the ten lords a leaping for £2,386.44.

The cheapest gift is two turtle doves, costing £30, while a partridge in a pear tree comes in at £37.95.

Andy Brown, who runs the site with his wife Beverley and their business partner Christine Wilder from the couple's home in Crowborough, said it took almost a week to source all the presents.

He said: "It was incredibly hard to find everything. The pipers were easy - we found a piper's web site, www.pipermusic.com and asked them how much it would cost to hire 11 pipers. In total they told us it was likely to cost £2,000.

"But try to find a calling bird - it's almost impossible.

"We spoke to a bird expert who told us it would either have to be a blackbird or a mynah bird but you can't buy blackbirds.

"Eventually we discovered you can make a private purchase of four mynah birds through the www.findit.co.uk web site at £400."

Andy's biggest challenge, however, was tracking down ten leaping lords.

"We tried to contact the House of Lords Press office to see if there would be any lords there who were prepared to jump up and down a bit for cash.

"The Press officer said 'you are out of your head' and put the phone down on us.

"It was a surprise. I thought some of them might be up for it.

"In the end we had to cheat a bit and suggest two tickets to see Lord Of The Dance in Las Vegas at a cost of £2,386.44 from expedia.com."

TheSimpleSaver was the brainchild of Christine and Beverley, whose hobby of emailing each other about bargains has now turned into an award-winning business.

Andy said: "Whenever they found a good deal on the web they would email each other. Then their friends got involved and suddenly the whole thing mushroomed into a site dedicated to uncovering great deals and bargains.

"It was officially launched in November 2001 and last month it beat eBay, Amazon and Which? to win the star shopping site award from Computeractive Web Guide.

"The reason the site works so well is it never tries to be anything other than a link to other sites.

"We don't actually sell anything ourselves, we just enjoy hunting out bargains."

The entrepreneurs decided to create the Christmas gift list instead of sending a Christmas card to their 10,000 registered users.

The site's Twelve Days of Christmas section also includes suggestions for alternative presents - like all four of Jamie Oliver's cookbooks for day four and a week in the sun for the seventh day.

The site explores the origins of the song, including an essay by Charlotte Russe suggesting it is about food.

But Andy believes the song is essentially religious.

"For many years, from the 1550s onwards, Catholics were not allowed to openly practise their faith in this country.

"One way of keeping it alive was to create songs which appeared to be nonsensical or non-religious but which were actually full of coded religious references.

"The theory goes that the true love is actually God and the partridge is a reminder of Christ because it feigns injury to save its chicks."

Although anyone with a spare £10,000 can now buy all the Twelve Days of Christmas gifts, Mr Brown doubts there will be many takers.

"It would be a very romantic gesture but I don't think you would be too popular with your true love if you did."