title: Using customer first name in order confirmation email
body: <p>I've seen a bunch of articles (mostly 3-5 years old) detailing various methods of getting the customer's first name into the order confirmation email but I just get either a blank, or unparsed PHP.</p>
  
  <p>For example this:</p>
  
  <pre><code>&lt;?php echo $this-&gt;__('Hello, %s', Mage::getSingleton('customer/session')-&gt;getCustomer()-&gt;getFirstname()); ?&gt;
  </code></pre>
  
  <p>Renders in the email like this:</p>
  
  <blockquote>
    <p>__('Hello, %s', Mage::getSingleton('customer/session')->getCustomer()->getFirstname()); ?></p>
  </blockquote>
  
  <p>Could somebody point me in the right direction? This is on Community Edition 1.7.</p>
  
  <p>Thanks</p>