Analysis: many Christmas babies have traditionally carried a key sign throughout their lives of when they were born in the form of their name
By Clodagh Tait, MIC Li merick
Under headlines like 'the perfect present', ‘bouncing into the New Year’, 'Nappy Xmas' and ‘Festive Joy’, pictures of bemused Christmas Day and New Year’s Day infants and their exhausted but proud parents are a staple of national and local newspapers. The earliest articles about New Year's babies appeared in Irish newspapers in the 1950s, but the papers’ attention to the first babies of the year increased during the 1960s. In earlier publications, the New Year’s babies are to the fore, but Christmas Day babies have begun appearing more recently.
Many Christmastime babies have traditionally carried a key sign of the timing of their births throughout their lives: their name. The Catholic parish registers database allows some analysis of seasonal baby-naming practices up to the 1910s. In many later 19th-century registers, December shows modest peaks in the use of the names of saints like Nicholas (commemorated on December 6th) and Thomas (feast on December 21st).
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Mary and Joseph appear too ‒ for example, Mary Josephine Dale was baptised in Wexford on Christmas Day, 1877. In the Catholic registers of Wexford and elsewhere, another saint's name associated with December was Anastasia, Stasia or Anstace (Christmas Day also being the feast of St Anastasia).
For the period 1864 to 1922, the Civil Registration Archive allows us to examine the Christmastime emphasis on the names like Stephen, the martyr-saint whose feast on December 26th has long been enthusiastically celebrated in Ireland. In 1900, for example, 131 Stephens were registered from January to November, and 79 in December (39% of the total for the year) and the first week of January 1901 also shows a disproportionate number of Stephens.
Other Christmas-related naming patterns are also evident. The Catholic clergy may have actively encouraged the flourishing of the names Christopher and Christina during Decembers in the later 19th century. On December 27th 1874, the three children baptised in Kingstown (Dun Laoghaire), Co. Dublin were Christopher Kelly, Christina Darcy and Christina Kelly.
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The tradition continued in the parish, facilitated by the growing adoption of middle names, which expanded naming potential. 11 of 15 children baptised between December 12th and 26th 1897 were given Christopher or Christina as an element of their name. The pattern is still visible in 1911, especially for the five children born exactly on December 25th, all of whom received the name Christopher or Christina.
A similar trend towards the Christmastime use of Christopher/Christina is evident in other Irish parishes at around the same time. It can also be seen in the civil registers: 364 Christinas were registered in 1900 and more than half (52%) were born in December; 44% of Christophers in the same year were December babies.
From the end of the 19th century, Noel (given to both boys and girls) and Noelle (usually given to girls) came to be deployed as names for Christmastime newborns. The civil registers show the use of Noel beginning to take off from the 1890s, and that most Noels had December birthdates. In the 1901 and 1911 censuses, the vast majority of Noels were aged under 20. In 1911, there were about 470 people with Noel as a first or middle name and nearly 90 of them female. In 1901, there had been fewer than 200 (with 32 females). At that point it seems that the use of the name, especially for women, was strongly concentrated among Protestants.
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There was a short burst of Noeleens in the 1910s, though the name disappeared for a while, until a relatively shortlived revival of Noeleen/Noelene in the mid 20th century. Ten Noelles were named in the period 1894 to 1927, all but one born in December. According to the Central Statistics Office name tracking app, which allows users to follow the popularity of Irish first names (though not middle names) from the mid-1960s, Noelle enjoyed a minor revival in the 1970s and 80s.
Poor Noel, already in decline from about 400 first names per annum in the mid-1960s, plunged thereafter to about 12 a year at present. The CSO graphs show some limited use of Nodlaig and Nollaig (Irish for Christmas) as a given name for girls in the 1970s and 1980s, and some people also use Nollaig as a cognate or translation of Noel or Noeleen.
Just remember Noel was probably considered an exotic name 120 years or so ago
The 'festive joy' newspaper articles indicate that Christmas babies still sometimes get called Noelle or Noel, if only as a middle name. Holly also appears as a Christmas name and it was 'the top name for girls born in December' in 2021. Its recent relatively high rankings in the Irish naming charts (number 31 in 2021) indicates it’s not used just at Christmas.
These days, the internet conveniently offers a wide choice of Christmas baby names. They range from the established (Noel, Holly, Nollaig) and the faux-traditional (Cuilinn, Holly, and Aoire, ‘shepherd’) to the international (Emmanuel/le, Angel, Felix) and the exotically monosyllabic (Starr, Yule, North). Just remember Noel was probably considered an exotic name 120 years or so ago.
This is an edited extract of the author's piece as published in Christmas & The Irish: A Miscellany (Wordwell) edited by Salvador Ryan
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Dr Clodagh Tait is a lecturer in History at MIC LImerick. She is a former Irish Research Council awardee
The views expressed here are those of the author and do not represent or reflect the views of RTÉ
