I am thinking a lot about my holiday budget right now.
My son’s gift pile will look smaller than it has in Christmases past. That’s not necessarily because the amount I have set aside for presents has gotten smaller but because the individual cost of his gifts has gone up so much. A $5 plastic truck takes up a lot of space for a 5-year-old. A video game box for a 15-year-old is pretty thin.
But at least I’m only doing one day of gifts, right? I’m not obligated to an ever-expanding mountain of presents as proof of my love over the course of almost two weeks. I am much luckier than the unfortunate gift giver at the heart of “The Twelve Days of Christmas.”
PNC calculated the cost of everything from a partridge in a pear tree to 12 drummers drumming at $46, 729.86 this year. Oh, but wait, that’s just each set. Add up all 12 days for each repetition of the song, and you get a whopping $201,972.66. That’s a staggering amount for any Christmas club account — especially when it’s mostly birds.
One thing jumped out at me from PNC’s exhaustive gift-by-gift breakdown of things like five gold rings, which are holding steady at $1,245, and two turtle doves, up 25% to $750.
The least expensive gift is not what I would have expected given its higher number. The eight maids-a-milking come in at a mere $58. They aren’t just the cheapest gift. They are the lowest by quite a bit, coming in at just 18% of the next lowest — that single partridge sitting in tree ($319.18, up 13.9% this year).
What? My grandparents had a dairy farm in Minnesota. I was offended at the casual disregard for what I knew to be backbreaking labor. How is a milkmaid worth so much less than a lady dancing (cost for nine: $8,308.12, same as last year) or a leaping lord (set of 10, $14,539.20, up 4%)?
It’s because the other people in the song are seen as specialized labor, with the costs calculated based on professional organizations such as the Philadelphia Ballet.
The milkmaids, on the other hand, are “unskilled labor.” (Try actually milking a cow and tell me that with a straight face.) As such, they are calculated based on federal — and Pennsylvania — minimum wage of $7.25 an hour.
OK, but I’m still offended. That $58 means the work took just an hour? I don’t think so. While the milking itself doesn’t take that long if you use a milking machine, it’s about a 30 minutes by hand and must be done twice a day.
Then there’s the cleanup, and a milking operation must be impeccably sterile. There’s the care of the cow, which is almost never-ending. My grandmother once brought a frozen calf into her house to thaw it in her bathtub.
It isn’t just the low hourly wage that hurts my heart. It’s the lack of attention to the whole job, which cannot be boiled down to just perching on a stool and walking away with a pail of milk.
It shows how our lowest earners are disrespected by us every day. The cost of eggs became a national shorthand for inflation and supply chain issues last year. But how much did we think about the people working in those operations, other than to call minimum wage workers lazy for not doing more?
The issue of minimum wage is a complicated one. Simply raising salaries isn’t as easy as it seems.
But what we can do — all of us — is give minimum wage workers the gift of our respect and appreciation for jobs we don’t want to do and in many cases couldn’t do. We can stop referring to them as unskilled when the skills they utilize are just differently acquired and differently implemented.
That’s a gift that could change a lot over time. And it’s priceless.
