December 22, 2008

Mix parties, alcohol, holiday cheer and New Year’s resolutions, and it’s no wonder so many babies are born in September.

McClatchy reports on the holiday mating phenomenon:

As expected, the holiday urge surge also expresses itself as a peak in U.S. births in September, according to David Lam of the University of Michigan’s Population Studies Center in Ann Arbor.

Holiday intimacies aren’t just an American rite, according to Gabriele Doblhammer of the Max Planck Institute for Demographic Research in Rostock, Germany. Heavy Christmas-New Year’s sex “is characteristic of all Christian cultures in which it has been evaluated,” she and co-researcher Joseph Lee Rogers found.

A quartet of British public health researchers went so far as to liken the Christmas-New Year’s period to a “festival on fertility” in a 1999 article in the Journal of the Royal Society of Medicine.

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