The ceremony keeps its own time,
the rest of the day is yours.

A christening, a baptism or a naming day is really two events held back to back. The first is the ceremony, and it belongs to the place holding it: a church, a chapel, a hall, a register office, a garden with a celebrant standing in it. That place owns the date, the start time, how long it runs and what may happen inside it. The second is the gathering afterwards, and that one is entirely yours, from the food to the length to whether it is twelve people or sixty.

So the order of work is fixed. Ask the place holding the ceremony first and build everything else around the answer. Practices differ enormously between traditions, between countries, and between two buildings in the same town; what is expected in one is unknown in another. Nobody can tell you what yours involves except the people who will lead it, and that one conversation is worth more than a week of reading.

Come away with the date and the start time, how long the ceremony lasts, whether you are sharing it with other families or joining something already in the diary, how many people the space holds, what is possible about photographs, whether there is paperwork or a meeting beforehand, and what is asked of godparents, sponsors or witnesses if your tradition has them.

Ask the awkward questions in the same breath, because they are ordinary questions at the other end of the phone. Families of two faiths ask them constantly, and many mark the birth twice, one ceremony in each tradition, sometimes weeks apart and often with the same guests at both. A name-giving ceremony with no religious content is a whole event in its own right rather than a lesser version of one: the promises are made in front of the same people and carry the same weight.

The role has different names and different weight depending on where you are. Godparents in some traditions, sponsors or witnesses in others, supporting adults or guide-parents at a naming ceremony, and in plenty of families no formal role at all. How many there can be, and what is asked of them on the day, is another question for whoever is holding the ceremony. Ask it early, because the answer can shape who you are able to choose.

Then separate the role from the guest list, because they are not the same shortlist. Being asked is not a ranking of your friendships and not being asked is not a demotion. Ask in person or on the phone, well before the invitations go out, and say plainly what you are asking for: not a job on the day, but a place in this child's life for the next twenty years. Finding out from a printed card is a poor way to hear it.

The wider list is usually shorter than people expect. Grandparents and great-grandparents, brothers and sisters, the two or three friends who will be at every birthday for a decade. Some families invite thirty people and some invite everyone they know, and both are normal. If the ceremony space is small, invite the close list to the ceremony and a wider one to the gathering afterwards. That is common and entirely fine, as long as the invitation says which parts each guest is invited to.

Start with the ceremony's start time and an arrive-by time beside it. Wedding guests know to be early; christening guests often read the time on the card as the hour things begin to drift into life, and arriving late at a ceremony that is already under way is far more uncomfortable than slipping into the back of a wedding. "The service begins at 11.00, please be seated by 10.45" does the whole job.

Then say whether there is a separate gathering, where it is, and roughly when it ends. Guests told only about the ceremony will make their own plans for the afternoon; guests told only about the lunch will miss the ceremony entirely. One line, "lunch afterwards at [place], until about four", answers three questions at once, including the one nobody asks out loud, which is how much of their day they are committing.

The line most invitations leave out is the one that matters most. Say that guests who do not share the faith, or who have none, are welcome at the ceremony. They almost always are, and the worry on the other side is real: people quietly decide they would be intruding and turn up at the restaurant instead. "The service is open to everyone, whatever you believe, and nothing is expected of you" removes it in a sentence. If you are not sure what to promise, ask the people holding the ceremony and use their words.

The rest is housekeeping that saves you a dozen messages: the child's full name, the address of both places and how far apart they are, parking or the nearest station, whether children are invited, which needs saying either way because parents assume in both directions, and how and by when to reply.

Keep the invitation itself to about five lines and let the page behind it carry the detail. Four shapes you can lift and fill in:

A church christening: "We are having Anna christened at [church] on Saturday 14 June. The service begins at 11.00, so please be there by 10.45, and lunch follows at [place] until about three. Everyone is welcome at the service, whatever you believe."

A chapel baptism: "Elias is being baptised at [chapel] on Sunday 6 July at 10.30. The chapel is small, so please arrive by 10.15. We will eat together at ours from noon onwards. Come as you are, and bring the children."

A naming day: "On Saturday 12 September we are giving our daughter her name in front of the people who will help us raise her. Ceremony at [place] at midday, lunch at the same address afterwards. No service and no hymns, just the promises and then a long afternoon."

Two traditions: "We are marking Mira's arrival twice, with a baptism at [place] on the 5th and a naming ceremony at [place] on the 19th. You are warmly invited to both, and just as warmly to either."

Whatever you write, put the reply request in the same breath as the date and give a real deadline rather than "let us know". If you are making the invitation as a page rather than a card, the invitation maker starts you from a template and you replace the words with your own. The structure does not change: what it is, where, when to arrive, what happens afterwards, and by when you need to hear back.

This is the part people underestimate, so here it is plainly: a ceremony at the wrong hour makes for a difficult morning, and everyone in the room will know it. A small baby feeds and sleeps to a pattern that will not move for the occasion. If you are offered a choice of times, take the one that sits after a feed and before the nap that matters, and let the adults' convenience come second.

The gap between the ceremony and the food is the other trap. Two empty hours means cold guests standing in a car park, a child who has been passed round twenty people, and photographs taken during the worst half hour of the day. Either keep the two places close and go straight from one to the other, or say in the invitation what the gap is for and where people can sit down in it.

Keep the whole thing shorter than you think you should. Three or four hours of gathering is generous, and the guest of honour will be finished long before the adults are. Decide in advance who may take the child out of the room and where they go, a quiet bedroom or the car for a drive, so that when the moment arrives nobody is standing in a doorway asking permission.

A christening is the one event where half the guest list is planning around somebody else's nap. Two things decide whether those families can come at all, and both cost you nothing more than a sentence.

The first is exact timings. Not "Saturday afternoon" but "ceremony at 11.00, lunch from 12.30, finished by four". A parent working out a two-hour drive, a feed and a nap cannot plan against a vague afternoon and will usually decline rather than risk it. Say when the day ends as clearly as you say when it starts.

The second is what is actually there. Somewhere to feed and change, room to leave a pram, whether there is a corner a toddler can move about in without being a nuisance, whether the food will suit a three-year-old and roughly when it appears. If the ceremony is a quiet room where a wandering two-year-old would be hard work, say so kindly and say they are welcome at the lunch. Parents would far rather be told than find out.

A low table with a few quiet things on it buys an hour of adult conversation and costs less than the flowers.

Customs here vary so widely that the only safe assumption is that your guests do not know yours. In some places people bring a keepsake meant to last: a piece of jewellery put away until the child is grown, an engraved cup, a coin, a first book with a message in the front, a tree planted in the garden. In others guests bring nothing at all, or something for the parents rather than the baby. Money is ordinary in some families and unthinkable in others.

You are allowed to say which it is. One line on the invitation settles it and saves a dozen people asking the same question separately, whether that is "please do not bring anything, having you there is the whole point" or "if you would like to bring something, we are collecting books for her shelf". Guests take their lead from you, and older relatives will follow whatever they grew up with unless somebody tells them otherwise.

Godparents, sponsors or witnesses often give something of their own, traditionally a thing kept rather than used, sometimes engraved with the date. In some places the parents give them a gift in return, and in others they pay for part of the day. None of it is universal. Ask an older relative what your family does, and if the answer is that your family has never done any of it, invent something. What tends to last is the object with the date on it and a photograph of the people who stood there.

A christening needs a headcount like any other event. Someone is cooking, or a caterer has a deadline, or the room has a limit, and "we'll be there" is not a number. The classic failure is the relative who replies warmly on behalf of four people she has not asked, two of whom are going somewhere else that day. Ask for names rather than a quantity and the list corrects itself.

Collect it in one go: coming or not, how many, the names of the people they are bringing, what they eat, including meal choice, dietary needs and allergens, and a box for a message, which is where the notes you end up keeping tend to appear. In Vowly the answers arrive as a list you read at a glance instead of a scroll of texts to count by hand, and the online RSVP page shows what comes back.

If the ceremony and the gathering have different guest lists, ask about them separately. Sub-event replies let a guest answer for the ceremony and for the lunch as two questions, and a part can stay invisible to the guests who were not invited to it, so nobody is looking at an event they are not going to. If the family list already exists in a spreadsheet it imports from .xlsx or .csv with a preview and duplicate detection, which earns its keep when three cousins share a surname.

One last thing a card cannot do. Ceremony times move, particularly shared ones, and a link is corrected once for everybody: change the time and every guest who opens it sees the new version, including the ones who opened it last week. The same page carries the directions, the schedule and the photographs afterwards, and each guest reads it in their own language, which counts for something when half the family is arriving from another country.