On 3 December 2020 the singer Conan Gray posted from his own account that it was officially heather day, noted that nobody had given him a sweater, and offered one to his followers. The date is the one named in the opening line of his 2020 song Heather.
CHAPTER 01
A moor plant that became a girl's name
Heather was a plant long before it was a person. It reaches modern English through Middle English hather, and older still it was a Scottish and northern English name for the low shrub that covers open ground. Only in the late nineteenth century did anyone start handing it to a child.
America took it up slowly. The name does not surface in the national naming record until 1914, and then only eight times, before a long climb that peaked in 1975, far above where the name sits today.
