The Most Popular Boy's Name

We sell a number of personalised products for children which feature the child’s name. We’ve been looking through the data and thought it would be interesting to see what the most popular names for boys and girls in Ireland are today. The products would typically be bought for children from birth to, perhaps, 6 years old, so the data is representative of children in that age range. This is interesting as it gives an idea of the most common names of children from a wide age group, rather than looking at birth statistics.

And the results are:

Top 5 Boys’ Names:

Thomas
Darragh
Jack
Benjamin
Luke

 Top 5 Girls’ Names

Sarah
Caoimhe
Chloe
Emily
Emma

Have you considered subscribing to my RSS feed?

Jody Did You Know? children's names, irish names, names, popular names

The Easter Bunny, That Well Known Christian Symbol... eh...

The Easter Bunny was certainly a big feature of Easter when I was growing up - but where is the connection with the traditional Christian Easter story? At least with Santa Claus there’s a tenuous connection with Christmas in the form of the legend of St. Nicolas. But the Easter Bunny - what on earth has he to do with Easter?

We run SoftandCuddly.ie and for the past couple of weeks, our cuddly bunnies have been literally hopping out the door and this is what got us thinking about the origins of this great Easter symbol.

So we did a little internet research and our bouncy friend seems to have his origins in Germany and first made an appearance in the 17th century. The first record of edible forms of the character appear in the early 1800s. As to the connection with Easter and Christianity, this is a little less certain and most links are sketchy at best.

The best that can be done is to link the Easter bunny with springtime. Like many traditional Christian holidays, the timing of the Easter celebration may have its origins as a pagan spring celebration. Given that the timing is tied in with the lunar calendar this makes sense. Eggs, rabbits and hares have long been prominent symbols of fertility in many cultures which can explain an association between spring time and rabbits. Further more, the mating antics of hares and rabbits around Easter time make these normally placid creatures a lot more conspicuous in the human eye.

During the spring mating season, many male hare approaches to females are rebuffed, pretty similar to the human experience! However, persistence gives way and the female finally succumbs. To the observer, this whole process can appear as a frantic dance as the male chases the female looking for some action! This is where the phrase “as mad as a March hare” comes from.

So it appears that the best we can do is to attribute the rabbit’s association with Easter down to his status as a fertility symbol and their crazy antics during spring time. Somewhere along the line, some Germans incorporated this into the Easter tradition and some entrepreneurial confectioner made edible ones.

So there you have it. Funny though that he hasn’t been commercialised to the same degree as Santa.

Have you considered subscribing to my RSS feed?

Jody Did You Know? easter, easter bunny, rabbits, soft toys