At-home christening invitations: how many guests fit

Forty names on a list, a living room that seats twelve and one bathroom. Christening invitations at home are not the hard part; the seating is. The cake is ordered, your mother keeps asking about chairs, and someone has offered to bring a folding table.

An at-home christening is not a smaller party. It is the same party split into shifts, so a different set of people is in the room at 12:00 and at 14:00. Sort the shifts first and the day runs itself.

Christening invitations at home: plan by rounds, not square metres

Capacity is measured in rounds, not floor area. If twenty people fit standing in your living room, twelve fit seated for lunch: each chair needs roughly 60 cm of table and another 60 cm of clear space behind it to push back and stand up. Two rounds of twelve are easier than twenty-four people eating off their laps.

• Chairs you already own, ignoring the ones you plan to borrow.
• Metres of usable table, and how many people fit along each side rather than in total.
• How many plates you can serve hot at the same time.
• Bathrooms available, and where coats, bags and prams can go that isn't the hallway.

Count the oven and the bathroom before you count heads

Count how many plates you can serve hot at once. If the oven holds one tray, two sittings are more honest than a thirty-minute queue with the first plates going cold. Grandparents and anyone with a pram don't rotate: give them fixed chairs by the window or near the bathroom door and build the rounds around them.

With one bathroom for thirty people, the long sit needs an escape valve. Send half the group to the balcony or the patio between coffee and cake, and the queue sorts itself out. Leave a corner for coats and bags too: the entrance hall is not a storeroom, and tables get cleared faster when nobody is tripping over a buggy.

A christening at home doesn't fall apart for lack of chairs. It falls apart for lack of a timetable.

Ceremony, table and the long sit: three hours, three settings

Put a time on each part of the day: ceremony in the living room at 12:00, lunch at 14:00, cake and coffee at 17:00. Changing slot means changing seats, and the same room clears and turns into the cake zone without anyone leaving the house. A digital invitation chains a scene for each of those moments: the threshold with the address and map, the table with the dress code, the long sit with the cake time. You edit the text field by field, add up to six of your own photos, and see it as you go. If the oven runs late or the menu changes, you edit the scene and the link stays the same. Replies land inside the invitation in one ordered list, so you stop counting yeses across three different chats. It costs 29.99 EUR, one-time payment, and you can try it free by editing the cover before you buy.