We need to talk about Europe’s Kevins

As families in Europe wind up the year, a few seasonal traditions will feel familiar, from Brussels to Bucharest. After awkwardly lugging an overpriced Christmas tree up an apartment staircase and dashing out for a panicked bout of gift-shopping, exhausted parents will plop the kids in front of the telly in search of a little yuletide peace. French youngsters will watch a film whose title translates as “Mummy, I missed the plane”, Hungarians one called “Tremble, burglars!” while Poles enjoy “Kevin alone in the house”. Beneath the dodgy dubbing lies the same film, “Home Alone”, an American flick from 1990. Its cultural significance in Europe is not so much its ubiquity in Christmas programming, nor the film’s cinematic merits (the highlight of the sequel is a cameo by one Donald Trump). Rather, sociologists point to the story’s young hero Kevin, a rascally type played by the then nine-year-old Macaulay Culkin. In the late 1980s, before the film came out, the most popular names given to baby boys in western Europe were local variants of ancestral ones: Julien in France, Jan in Germany, Johannes in the Netherlands. By 1991 Kevin was the most popular name in all three countries, and stayed so for many years.