Birthday Eve

Some time ago I had a thought - if you had a daughter and she was born on Christmas Eve or New Year’s Eve, would you be tempted to name her Eve?

Some time ago I had a thought — if you had a daughter and she was born on Christmas Eve or New Year’s Eve, would you be tempted to name her Eve?

At the time, I had access to a database with a large number of names and birthdays,¹ so I thought I’d check. I ran a query similar to the following:

select count(*)

from people

where
  people.first_name = 'Eve'
  and
  month(people.date_of_birth) = 'Dec'
  and
  day(people.date_of_birth) in (24, 31)

And the result?

Zero.

I was mildly disappointed. I didn’t look into it any further (and in hindsight I could have also checked similar names such as Eva or Evelyn), but it seems that even though there are a few people who are willing to be creative with their child’s name², the name Eve is not very popular³ and there aren’t that many opportunities. Even if you took the whole of New Zealand:

60000 /   # babies born each year
  365 *   # assuming even number each day
  2 /     # Xmas and NY Eve
  2       # only females

[1] 164.3836

I would like to believe that in a larger population such as the UK or USA it has happened at least several times, but the only one I’ve been able to find is the singer Evelyn Knight who was born on New Year’s Eve 1917.

Googling, I found people like me amused at the hypothetical, and one person who confessed to nearly naming their daughter Eve because she was conceived on New Year’s Eve. Strangely, I also came across a family with three kids born on Christmas Eve and another with three kids born on New Year’s Eve!

---

1. I won’t say which one, but there are at least five to choose from.↩

2. Or abusive!↩

3. At least recently - it didn’t make the top 100 names in the past 5 years.↩