Maids a-milking finally received a raise this year and gold prices jumped, a combination that made it more costly than ever to bestow the elaborate set of gifts from the classic holiday carol “The 12 Days of Christmas.”
This year, the song’s true love would spend $19,507 to give every whimsy on the 12th day — from the partridge in a pear tree to the 12 drummers drumming — according to the holiday index tabulated by PNC Wealth Management in Pittsburgh.
That is up 3.1 percent over the cost of last year’s gift package, said James P. Dunigan, the company’s managing executive for investments.
“The first minimum-wage increase in a decade along with higher gold prices being passed to consumers were major reasons why the Christmas Price Index rose,” he said.
The company started tracking the cost of giving the medieval carol’s bevy of gifts — 364 items, if the partridge and its pear tree are counted together in each verse — 23 years ago as a catchy way of tracking economic trends. Goods used to be the burden on the true love’s pocketbook, but the cost of services has risen steadily since PNC began the index in 1984. Entertainment from the ladies dancing and lords a-leaping has increased 300 percent over the last two decades.
“What’s interesting is how closely the index tracks the Consumer Price Index,” Mr. Dunigan said. That index, the inflation measure produced by the federal Bureau of Labor Statistics, was up 4.3 percent in November from a year earlier.
Unskilled labor had remained consistently cheap for years, but the eight maids a-milking received their first raise in a decade after Congress lifted the minimum wage to $5.85 an hour. The maids can expect to receive more increases next year and in 2009.
Even so, their cost — $46.80 this year — is modest, and dwarfed by the 21.5 percent rise in the price of the five gold rings specified in the carol. That price tag came to $395, compared with $325 last year.
Among the tokens of affection, the six geese and four calling birds went up the most, 20 percent and 25 percent. Geese prices reflect higher prices for food, Mr. Dunigan said, and the price of calling birds — canaries, in today’s parlance — is driven up by demand and shipping costs.
Unlike last year, when the lords a-leaping, pipers piping, drummers drumming and ladies dancing ran up the bill, pay for skilled labor increased modestly in 2007. Nine ladies dancing commanded only a 3 percent increase, to $4,759, based on figures from Philadanco, a modern dance company based in Philadelphia.
The 10 lords a-leaping — based on prices provided by the Pennsylvania Ballet — also rose 3 percent, to $4,285. The 11 pipers were up 4.2 percent, to $2,213, and the dozen drummers also cost 4.2 percent more, at $2,397, based on information from a Pennsylvania musicians’ union.
This year, the partridge’s cost, according to information from the Cincinnati Zoo, remained the same — $15. But the pear tree went up to $149, a 15.4 percent increase, according to figures from a Philadelphia nursery, which attributed the price increase to commercial landscaping demand.
After all the verses — when the singer has 12 partridges in 12 pear trees — the song’s gifts would cost $78,100, up 4 percent over 2006. This contrasts with $128,886, a 2.5 percent increase from last year, to assemble the same gifts on the Internet. Giving only the gifts from the 12th day, an online shopper would be set back $31,249, 3 percent more than last year and significantly more than the old-fashioned way of gathering the gifts because shipping costs drive the tab higher.
The only time that the PNC index has not closely paralleled the Consumer Price Index was in 1995, when swan prices tumbled because of increased availability. The cost for seven swans a-swimming is $4,200 today, nearly half the price two decades ago.
From: New York Times.com
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