A christening is a wonderful opportunity to introduce your little one to your religion, and a chance to get all of the family together to celebrate your child. But as with planning any large get together, putting together a christening can be stressful. To ensure everything runs smoothly and you can have a great day along with your guests, here’s a checklist of things to consider!
Create The Invite List
Your first task will be decide who will be coming to the occasion. The christening will be split up into two parts, the ceremony and the party. You could keep the ceremony to close friends and family and then invite your wider circle to the celebration afterwards. You can find specific invitations from sites like Pure Invitation, make sure to specify which part (or both) people are invited to.
Decide on a Theme/ Colour Scheme
Any party should be decked out to look nice, a christening is no exception. While it’s not going to be as extravagant as say, a wedding, you can still have a colour scheme or theme and decorate to match. From there choose decor items such and bunting, balloons and flowers to match. If you’re buying a cake, this could be decorated in the same colour.
Choose Your Baby’s Outfit
Long lace white gowns are traditional for both boys and girls, but you don’t have to go down this route. Girls could be put in any pretty dress, and boys a smart trouser suit. These days you can buy all kinds of beautiful creations online so spend some time browsing through and finding the perfect piece. These photos will feature in the family albums forever more, so you want them to be right! If you’re ordering from somewhere like eBay and the seller is in China (where lots of clothing items are manufactured) make sure you check the shipping dates. These can take up to a month to come, you need to order in plenty of time. Give yourself time to order a backup option too if it doesn’t look exactly like you thought when it arrives.
Create a Gift List
Creating a gift list means people aren’t buying things you already have and wasting money. There are plenty of websites you can set this up online these days, if you choose things from at a range of prices it’s easy for people to choose something off it depending on what they want to spend. Amazon is the obvious choice, but there are all kinds of alternatives too. If you feel a little uncomfortable about asking for gifts doing it online can make it easier, and people can decide whether or not they want to buy something without feeling pressured.
Decide on Food
Will you bring in caterers for a formal sit down meal? If you have a little more money to spend this could be an option. Alternatively, you could for a more informal buffet style menu, you could even create this yourself. That way you will save money and can put on a wide selection of choices- with the help of close friends and family you could easily make some sandwiches, bake some marinated chicken, slice up some quiches and pour crisps and snacks into bows. You could even go down the route of a hog roast, these are commonly used for weddings but are perfect crowd pleasers so could easily be used for something like this too.
Capture The Moment
These days, mobile phone and digital cameras are excellent and should allow you to capture some great shots of the day. But if you wanted to go all out you could hire a professional photographer for an hour. When you’ve spent a lot of money on the day it makes sense that you’d want nice pictures to look back on. Another great way you could get photos from the day is to hire a photo booth. These will give you fun and lighthearted pictures and are also entertaining for guests.
Entertainment
For young guests, entertainment like balloon modelling, a magician, puppet show or bouncy castle will keep them amused. Christenings can be a long day, particularly if they’ve been to the ceremony too. This gives them chance to have fun which in turn allows the parents to have fun too. A christening is traditionally a formal affair but you can really have fun with it if you want to and do it your way, so if you feel entertainment will add to the day then go for it!
