Twelve days at $5/day

I wonder what was in that pipe?

Remember that Christmas carol The Twelve Days of Christmas?" Get out your sticks, because today is that twelfth day and it features twelve drummers drumming. At east nowadays it's usually twelve drummers drumming. The song is an old folk song from 18th century England, and at various times and places what you get from your true love on the twelfth day has varied. It's been "lords a leaping," "bells ringing," "fiddlers fiddling," and "ladies dancing."

Twelve Days of Christmas by Xavier Romero-Frias

For whatever reason, the twelfth day has never included twelve french hens, swans a-swimming, or a dozen geese a-laying (even though, you know, eggs come by the dozen). This seems odd in light of the fact that in the US, today is National Bird Day. It's dedicated to bird watching, pet bird adoption, bird sanctuaries and rescue organizations. Maybe song got out of sync because there is also a Bird Day in the US without the “National”, and that one is celebrated on May 4. Make a note to see if you can find anybody singing The Twelve Days of Christmas in about five months, pay particular attention to the delivery on the twelfth day.

Compiling all those gifts for one's true love seems like it would be a huge amount of work — not just finding everything, but once you have the lot, what about short-term maintenance? How do you make sure those lords jumping around don't frighten the partridges (not to mention all the other birds; after all there are partridges, turtle doves, french hens, geese, swans, and some noisy calling birds of unspecified species). I suppose that's just imaginary work, unless somebody somewhere has actually attempted it. But January 5 has some connections to real-world work as well. This is the day that the Ford Motor Company rolled out their new labor rules for factory workers: the new workday lasted only 8 hours instead of 10 or more, and wages were increased to $5 per day. Even bonus pay was available. With that kind of money, along with their new leisure time, blue-collar workers could afford their own automobiles. Most of them chose Model T Fords. Could be just a coincidence.

With all those new-fangled horseless carriages clattering around all over the place, more roads were needed. Some of those roads eventually needed bridges. And sure enough, January 5, 1933 is the day construction started on the Golden Gate Bridge across San Francisco Bay. It took four years to build, but I think everyone agrees it was worth the wait — as the Frommer travel guide says, it's "possibly the most beautiful, and certainly the most photographed, bridge in the world."

Waiting is connected to January 5 in other ways too. The day's most famous waiting was January 5, 1953 when Samuel Beckett's Waiting for Godot premiered in Paris. Vladimir and Estragon, the two main characters, never meet Godot, but they do hear from a boy — possibly two different boys on two different days — who assures them that Godot is arriving the next day for sure. But he doesn’t. It's almost like Godot is making promises that he can't make good on. We never learn much about Godot, but the way he promises something and doesn't come through suggests that maybe he's a politician? After all, that's one of the things politicians are known for.

Take January 5, 1957 for example. That's the day Dwight Eisenhower, the US President at the time, made a speech outlining his Eisenhower Doctrine. It was a promise that middle Eastern countries feeling threatened by any army could request US help. The Eisenhower Doctrine was tested that very year, in the Syrian Crisis of 1957. It was kicked off when the Syrian government appointed some new people to top military and strategic posts, leading neighboring countries (Lebanon, Jordan, and Iraq) to openly consider a military attack on Syria to overthrow the government. They were afraid the Syrian government was preparing to adopt communism and ally itself with the USSR. Luckily the Eisenhower Doctrine was already in place to forestall military threats and actions in that part of the world. Unluckily, if Syria was waiting for US help, their experience was the same as Vladimir’s and Estragon’s. Help from the US, like Godot, never arrived. Eisenhower himself later admitted that the point of his Doctrine really wasn't what was originally claimed; it was really just an attempt to stop people in the Middle East from forming more modern, organized nations.

Major strategic doctrines are often named for their leading proponents, at least in the US. Besides the Eisenhower Doctrine, there's been the Monroe Doctrine, the Reagan Doctrine, the Clinton Doctrine, and who knows how many others. Naming these things after their promulgators seems to be fairly recent — it only got really rolling about the middle of the 20th Century. It could, though, be an extension of the much longer tradition of naming discoveries after their  explorers. In 1779, January 5 saw the birth of Zebulon Pike, the name behind Pike's Peak. In business, too, many founders use their own names as well. King Gillette was born on January 5, 1855 and grew up to found the Gillette Company. And let's not forget Frederick Converse, born on January 5, 1871, who went on to...no, wait, he had nothing to do with basketball shoes. Frederick Converse was an American composer in the classical genre. He wrote symphonies and operas, and his opera The Pipe of Desire was the first-ever written by an American to be performed at New York's Metropolitan Opera. You probably haven’t heard (of) it, but you might have heard Converse’s symphony The Mystic Trumpeter. It’s probably his best-known work.

But wait a sec...Frederick Converse was born on January 5, and he wrote The Pipe of Desire. Now, remember that Christmas carol with the Pipers Piping? That very same carol includes swans, and the call of a swan is called trumpeting. And that could mean a swan, which had inexplicably shown up in a Christmas carol (I mean come on, a Christmas swan?) a Mystic Trumpeter, which Converse also wrote about. And that means there could be a secret code hidden either in the carol or the symphony (or the opera) that talks about the real story behind some of these politicians and their doctrines, throwing light on events that would eventually occur on the very next day of the month, January 6, when…nah, couldn't be, right? Right??