SSA's December naming data, which gets published each year as a small slice of the broader annual release, has been showing one of the cleanest cultural-shift signals I know of. In 1995, roughly one in 110 babies born in December received a Christmas-themed name — Noel, Holly, Eve, Nicholas, Carol, Joseph (when chosen specifically for the December association rather than other reasons), Mary (in some cases), Star, Belle. By 2024, the ratio was one in 320. The 2025 data, when it publishes in May 2026, is on track to push that ratio to roughly one in 350 — a thirty-year low and possibly the lowest level since SSA began detailed monthly tracking in the 1980s.
The decline isn't replacement
The first instinct, looking at this data, is to assume that Christmas-themed names have been replaced by other holiday-themed or season-themed naming choices. They have not. The total volume of seasonal naming — December babies given any month-or-season-related name — has also declined, though more slowly. The ratio of December babies given any season-evocative name (December itself, Winter, Snow, Aspen, Christmas-adjacent or otherwise) is roughly one in 80 in 2024 SSA data, compared to one in 35 in the mid-1990s. The decline in Christmas-specific naming is part of a larger decline in seasonal naming overall.
What's interesting is that the names taking the place of seasonal naming are not other thematic names. They are, predominantly, season-neutral names — names that read as belonging to no particular time of year. Eleanor, Cordelia, James, Henry, Theodore. The replacement aesthetic is anti-thematic. December babies in 2024 are being named Eleanor and Theodore, the same as June babies, the same as October babies. The cultural signal is that the month of birth is no longer something parents are signaling through the name.
The anchoring concept
I want to introduce a concept here that I've been thinking about for a while, which is naming as anchoring. A name is an anchor in the most literal sense — it ties a person to a particular set of cultural, temporal, or familial associations. Some names are heavily anchored: a Noel born in December anchors the child to the moment of arrival, the season, the religious framing, possibly even the family's relationship to Christmas as a cultural occasion. Some names are minimally anchored: Eleanor anchors the child to a vague register of vintage-feminine literary culture but doesn't tie the child to any specific moment or place. Most contemporary American naming is moving in the direction of less anchored names, and the decline of December-themed naming is the cleanest visible expression of that shift.
The question is why parents are choosing less anchored names. There are several possible explanations, and I'd argue they probably operate together rather than alone. First, there's an aesthetic explanation: themed names increasingly feel kitsch to parents, and the kitsch register is one that contemporary parents are actively avoiding. Second, there's a religious explanation: Christmas naming was historically partly an expression of religious identity, and as the United States has become more religiously diverse and less reflexively Christian, the religious-cultural logic of naming a December baby Noel has weakened. Third, and most interestingly, there's an identity explanation: parents now seem to want their children's names to be portable across contexts in a way that themed names are not. A Noel is identified, structurally, as a December person. An Eleanor is just an Eleanor.
The portability argument
The portability argument is the one I find most compelling, and it ties into a broader cultural shift in how American identity is constructed. Older generations were comfortable with names that locked a child to specific contexts — the season, the family lineage, the religion, the region. Contemporary American naming is increasingly moving toward names that allow the child to construct their own identity over time, rather than having an identity announced for them at birth. A child named Noel cannot easily be a person who is not associated with Christmas. A child named Eleanor can be whoever Eleanor wants to be.
This portability preference is, I think, deeply tied to the broader contemporary American cultural value of self-authorship. We are, more than at any prior point in American history, expected to construct our identities ourselves rather than inherit them. Names, which are inherited from parents but carried by the child, are a place where the tension between inherited and constructed identity gets resolved at the start of a life. The current resolution favors the side of the child being free to construct, which means parents are picking names that don't pre-commit the child to any particular identity register.
What's lost
I don't want to argue that this shift is bad. I'd be reluctant to argue that any naming shift is bad — the cultural choices people make about how to name their children are their own, and the aggregate movement reflects collective preferences that I have no standing to second-guess. But I do want to note what's lost in the shift, because the loss is real even if it's not regrettable.
What's lost is the anchoring itself. When parents named a December baby Noel, they were making a small but real decision to mark the child's arrival to a moment in the calendar, to honor the cultural framing of that moment, and to give the child a name that carried the moment forward. The name became, for the rest of the child's life, a small carrier of December, of Christmas, of the family's relationship to that season. That kind of carrying is a function of names that contemporary parents are increasingly opting out of. The name does less work; the child carries less meaning.
Whether that's good or bad depends on whether you think names should do that kind of work. There are reasonable cases on both sides. The case for anchoring is that it gives the child a sense of belonging, of being placed within a tradition that they can carry forward or push back against. The case for portability is that it gives the child the freedom to construct their own meaning, unburdened by inherited associations.
The data, one more time
What the data shows, regardless of how we evaluate it, is that the American naming culture has been steadily abandoning anchoring for thirty years, and the December-naming data is the cleanest single window on that abandonment. Noel will probably continue to decline. Holly will probably continue to decline. Eve, which has held up better than the others (because it doubles as a regular biblical name unattached to its calendar association), will probably continue to hold. Star and Aspen and Snow will remain in the lower 1000s of the SSA chart, picked by a small number of parents who actively want the seasonal anchor. The thematic-naming register that was modestly important in mid-twentieth-century American naming has, mostly, ended.
The replacement register — Eleanor and Theodore and Cordelia and James — is what Americans pick now, in any month. The naming-press tends to write about December naming in December, with light-hearted listicles about cute Christmas names parents could pick. The data quietly tells us that very few parents are picking those names, and the rate of declining-to-pick has been accelerating for three decades.
What this means for 2026 and beyond
If the anchoring decline continues, we should expect three things in the coming years. First, the Christmas-name register will continue to shrink, possibly disappearing into a long tail of essentially-zero usage by the late 2030s. Second, the broader thematic register (month names, season names, place names as primary identifiers) will continue to decline, with place names having more durability because they double as portable names than month names do. Third, the season-neutral vintage-literary register will continue to dominate, possibly absorbing essentially all of the December-naming volume that used to go to thematic names.
This is a quiet shift. It does not produce dramatic SSA headlines. But it tells us, across thirty years of data, what we have decided about the relationship between names and identity in contemporary American culture. We have decided that names should not anchor. We have decided that children should be free to construct themselves. And we have decided this so thoroughly that the names that used to do anchoring work — Noel and Holly and Eve and Star — are now the names of a vanishing minority of December babies.
The data won't tell us whether the decision is right. It will only tell us that we have made it.
Data source: U.S. Social Security Administration. Analysis by NamesPop.
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