Filthy lucre all around! Well, at least for anyone who had the faith and/or the foresight to buy Apple stock, that is; Christmas / Chanukah / Kwanzaa / Unspecified Non-Denominational Celebratory Holiday Gift-Giving Occasion came early this year for AAPL investors, in the form of what every stockholder wants most: upgrades, upgrades, UPGRADES! Yes, folks, as faithful viewer MrKruser kindly pointed out, two, count 'em, two Wall Street analysts just chucked higher price targets and revenue projections down the chimney with a big ol' "Ho ho ho" and without asking for so much as a glass of milk and a plate of novelty-shaped sugar cookies in exchange. Who knew Santa wore Armani?

According to the Associated Press, Robert Cihra of Fulcrum Global Partners is apparently so full of holiday cheer (and possibly a little rum-spiked eggnog) that he's come around to believing in Apple's own alleged internal estimate that Santa will leave 4 million iPods under trees, in stockings, and in various other holiday gift receptacles before the year is out; therefore, Bob's upped his revenue estimate for Apple's current quarter from $2.86 billion to a rosy-cheeked $3.23 billion, and boosted his original profit guesstimate of 41 cents per share to a full 50 cents accordingly. His new price target for AAPL? A darn toasty $65 per share, up from an already perfectly acceptable $53. Happy Holidays to you, too, Bob-- drink up, there's plenty more where that came from!

And yet, Gene Munster of our old pal Piper Jaffray makes ol' Bob Cihra look like the freakin' Grinch by comparison. You remember these guys, right? They're the ones who gave AAPL a nice little shot in the arm recently when they reported that a stunning 40 percent of high school students either have an iPod already or expect to own one within a year. Well, get this: Gene's been playing with surveys again, and his latest one reveals that "13 percent of iPod users in our sample users were formerly PC users that, following the purchase of their iPod, have already either purchased a Mac (6 percent) or are planning to buy a Mac within 12 months (7 percent)." Yowza. Halo effect, anybody?

The upshot is that Gene almost doubled his price target on AAPL from $52 to a just-plain-scary $100 per share, citing the "wildfire word-of-mouth marketing" crossing over from the iPod to the Macintosh. That, and to a lesser extent the kind words from Bob (why do we feel like the kid on Christmas morning who says "Gee, Grandma, thanks for the Xbox!! And, um, the socks are nice, too, Mom"?) drove Apple's stock price as high as $64 before it finally closed at $61.35, up over six bucks (11.2 percent) and within spitting distance of AAPL's highest pre-plunge values of 2000-- also known as AAPL's highest split-adjusted values ever.

You know what this means, of course: a year or two down the line, investors will either look back on this as the turning point that took Apple's stock into uncharted territory, or as that time that the stock skyrocketed to unreasonably high values only to get dropped three miles earthward when holiday sales didn't come close to everyone's overinflated expectations. Think you know what's going to happen? Bets are being taken at your local or online brokerage-- and it's even legal, too.