Ask the average Joe what the worst day of the year to be born is and most will suggest Christmas Day. Those people are wrong: it is in fact, the day after. I would know, since I am one of the unfortunate few to be born on Boxing Day – when little is open, friends are scarce and your birthday presents are likely combined with Christmas gifts.
Data partly backs my decades of moaning – 26 December has been the least popular day to be born in England and Wales for at least the past 30 years, according to the Office for National Statistics. To give you some idea of just how unpopular, Boxing Day births between 1995 and 2024 dropped to as low as 1,050 last year and reached a high of only 1,601 in 2012. It also took 366th place in an ONS ranking of popular birth dates between 2001 and 2021 with an average of 1,345 births – a number so low it was somehow surpassed by even 29 February, which saw 1,752 births on average, despite it only occurring every four years.
Conversely, the most popular day to be born in England and Wales has for the last 30 years fallen in September or at the very start of October. So while there may be fewer babies joining the elite Christmas birthday club, there’s no shortage of them being conceived at that time of year. And it’s not just UK nations either – figures for New Zealand and the US also show a larger number of babies born in September. There’s myriad reasons for an apparent spike in festive fornication, says Alice Reid, a professor of demography at the University of Cambridge.
“It could be unintended conceptions at Christmas time; it could be that you’re going away and having a nice time; it could be that you’re more relaxed so more likely to conceive; it could be down to waiting until the new year, as I did, and saying, ‘then I can stop drinking and [Christmas] will be my last hurrah before I go on a detox period and make my body healthy for a baby’.”
She points out there’s also a potential link with summer weddings, a trend which has been popular in England since the 1970s.
“Marriages are much more likely now in the late summer period when there are bank holidays,” explains Prof Reid, who has studied the seasonality of marriages and births. “Then people go on honeymoon and might say, ‘OK, well, let's wait until after the honeymoon then we'll start trying after a few months’ [ie, around Christmas]... then they might be having their first birth in September.”
While some newlyweds take a more relaxed attitude to starting a family, there’s a school of thought that some would-be parents plan a Christmas conception deliberately with their future child’s education in mind, says Prof Reid.
“Children who have September and October birthdays are just that much more developed,” she says. “It's not to say that children who are born later in the school year are permanently disadvantaged but we can see an effect of children who are born earlier in the school year – [they’re] quite a lot more advanced.”
Potential mums and dads nowadays might well be swayed by the sort of research from the Institute for Fiscal Studies, which shows children born at the start of the academic year in England achieve better exam results. But it has not always been the case that September births have been the most popular. Prof Reid says the seasonality of births has, in fact, changed dramatically over time.
Data compiled by Cambridge from multiple sources dating from 1540 to 2022 shows most babies in England were born in February and March in the pre-industrial period, shifting to April and the autumn in the early 19th century, then back to the spring by the mid-20th century.
As is often the case with conclusions drawn from genealogical data, it comes with caveats. Data from the 16th century in fact comes from parish registers and therefore reflects baptisms rather than births, cautions Prof Reid. Back then, those events tended to only be days apart, so are likely a reliable representation of when births occurred. By 1800, that gap had widened to a month; however, records from the mid-19th century onwards reflect actual births.
But to understand the variation in birth trends over the past 500 years, we must consider what was going on outside of the home – and not just inside its bedrooms. For example, there was a big lull in conceptions between August and November from 1540 to roughly 1750 – with one factor in particular likely having a major impact, explains Prof Reid.
“The seasonality of the working year was a really big influence on birth seasonality, particularly when most people worked in agriculture,” she says. “It was therefore a bit less likely to conceive during harvest time when both men and women were working really hard in the fields and were probably actually quite exhausted.”
Instead, births in this era peaked in February and March, suggesting a conception in the late spring and early summer of the previous year.
“Easter and Whitsun were big holidays in the agricultural year and seem to have been big times for conceptions,” says Prof Reid. “The weather is also a bit nicer so, you know, people are going out, doing things, getting together a bit more. Lots of people were having sex outside marriage too, and the seasonality of illegitimate births actually follows this pattern as well.”
Holiday sex is hardly a new idea. Sir William Beveridge, an economist and social reformer influential in the founding of the British welfare state, once suggested that holidays were a “natural opportunity” for mating – married or not. But by the mid-19th century, birth patterns were shifting again, with peaks in April and the autumn. Prof Reid says it reflects the changing working patterns of the post-industrial world.
“It’s associated with urbanisation. A far smaller proportion of the British population was working in the fields, people were working in towns and in factories and so there just wasn’t as much seasonality,” she explains. “So we get a slight change towards a greater reliance on holidays which produced this slight favouring of births at certain times of year.”
By the mid-20th century, a spring peak in births had reappeared which Prof Reid believes is due to the introduction of a tax break that meant a man received a cash boost if he married before the end of the financial year. It wasn’t a sum to be sniffed at – a groom that married on 31 March in 1968 would receive £120 more – equivalent to £2,000 today – than if he’d stayed single, according to the ONS.
“During this post-war period, people were having a relatively small number of children and, by and large, they were waiting until after they got married to have those children,” says Prof Reid, indicating that newlyweds were typically falling pregnant by early summer, having spent a couple of months settling into married life before taking advantage of bank holidays and warmer weather to start trying for a family.
It was the last big shift reflected in the records; the September births have been a stable trend for some 50 years and Prof Reid doesn’t see it changing.
“I think this reflects our current patterns of family formation and the solemnisation of that,” she says. “While lots of births are outside marriage – more than half – the remainder of people are often waiting to start a family and they’re linking that to a marriage, and the seasonality of marriages [in summer] shows no sign of reducing.”
As to why festive births remain unpopular? Prof Reid says it might be because fewer inductions and cesareans are scheduled for the Christmas period. Certainly, my parents can attest to the fact that hospital staff had to be rounded up from a party to welcome me into the world and did so wearing paper crowns.
“Boxing Day is so unpopular because very short-term seasonality of birth now is dictated to some extent by medical procedures – hospitals don’t plan them for Christmas Day and so you don't get [as many] babies born on Boxing Day,” adds Prof Reid. “But I also think people are trying not to have births over the Christmas period. I think back to when I was planning to get pregnant and thought ‘we'll try now and if we don't get pregnant soon, we'll stop for a bit because we don't want to have a child who has a Christmas birthday’."
I, for one, would champion this level of planning. Historically, we might not always have had more sex at Christmas – but keeping the September birth trend alive is a great way to avoid gifting a child the curse of a festive birthday.
