Every year, the Friday preceding Mother’s Day is an important day for anyone interested in the most popular baby names in the United States. That’s the day when the U.S. Social Security Administration posts to its website the data for the previous calendar year showing the most popular baby names in the country. 

It’s like the Academy Awards for the baby names crowd, only not as much fun.

This year, there was hardly any change in the top ten names for both boys and girls. In fact, the top girl’s name in the United States, for the eleventh boring year in a row, is Emily. (Nothing wrong with Emily, but number one for over a decade? Whatever happened to creative baby naming?). And for boys, Jacob was the top baby name for the eighth year in a row. Yawn.

Here is a useful roundup of the top baby names of 2006.

With the exception of Reese Witherspoon’s “Ava,” which made an impressive showing at number 5, and possibly Gwen Stefani’s “Kingston,” debuting in the top 1000 at number 941, I don’t see much crossover from the world of celebrity baby names to the real world. That shouldn’t surprise anyone, since celebrity baby names are on the leading edge of our culture, except in cases where the name has fallen clear over the edge. (Moxie Crimefighter comes to mind, as does Kal-El, Pilot Inspektor, and Apple).

Considering it was 2006, one might have expected the names Shiloh or Suri to crack the top 1000, but there was no sign of either.

If anything, some celebrity baby names seem to reflect the real world, rather than vice versa. Kevin Costner’s new baby boy, Cayden, is a good example. Cayden is an increasingly popular name in the “aden” category, including all kinds of rhyming variants such as Jayden, Braden, Aiden, Kayden, etc. Costner, in fact, is quite the trendy baby namer — his son’s middle name Wyatt, also chosen by Sheryl Crow, is also an increasingly popular name.

The name Sebastian, picked for her son by actress Kim Fields, is also growing more popular, as is Marcia Cross’s “Savannah” and T.V .Psychic John Edwards’s “Olivia.”

But perhaps the biggest name to move between Hollywood and the rest of us is the name Addison, which happens to be the name of Kate Walsh’s character on ABC’s Grey’s Anatomy. In the 2006 rankings, the name Addison was the fastest-rising name in the top 100, rocketing from number 106 to number 27.

Is it life imitating art, or art imitating life? Or is it all just one big blur?

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Today, at checkout stands throughout the land, Marcia Cross is staring at you from the cover of this week’s People Magazine, saying “I feel so lucky.”

And why shouldn’t she? Those are a cute pair of babies she’s snuggled up with. And the fact that she’s on the cover of America’s top gossip mag can’t hurt her career, either.

But on to the baby name stuff. Cross, who stars as the unflappable Bree Van De Kamp on Desperate Housewives, spills the beans in the People cover story about how she and husband Tom Mahoney came up with the names for their twin daughters, Eden and Savannah, born on February 20.

Cross tells the magazine that she once had a premonition that she would have a child named Savannah. And without knowing this story, before they even knew they were expecting girls, Mahoney emailed Cross and suggested the name Savannah. Cross said it ”gave her the chills.”

Me too. Spooky, really.

So how can you top that one? You can’t. The name Eden came to her, she says, while she was getting a massage.

Okay. That’s more like it. Probably just some subconscious thing, from the Garden of Eden imagery at the start of Desperate Housewives. And it definitely goes with Savannah, somehow.

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Posted on April 13th 2007 and posted to CELEBRITY BABIES, Marcia Cross | Comments(2)

The twins are here. The much-anticipated births took place on February 20 in Los Angeles, as actress Marcia Cross, star of the hit T.V. show Desperate Housewives, and husband Tom Mahoney, welcomed their new daughters, according to People.

Cross, who has been twice nominated for an Emmy for her portrayal of Bree Van De Kamp on Desperate Housewives, has been on bedrest for over a month prior to the birth.

The girls are named Eden and Savannah.

The name Eden is well-documented, and means “place of pleasure” in Hebrew.

“Savannah,” well-known as a famous city in Georgia, has less clear roots.  One website believes the word, which means “grassy plain,” comes from the Native American word zabana. Another site claims “Savannah” is of Spanish origin.

Roots aside, I give Cross and Mahoney a “thumbs up” for the pair of names. It’s twice as hard coming up with names for twins, and Eden and Savannah has a nice, original ring to it.

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photo by Photorazzi 

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