The Princess and The Pickle: The Pickle's Christening and 1st Birthday Celebrations

When The Princess was born we started planning her Christening almost immediately, she was baptised at 2 months old. We didn’t really give it a lot of thought in all honesty, it seemed to be ‘the done thing’ when you had a baby – everyone expected a Christening. However, we are not regular church – goers and put a lot more thought into whether or not to have a Christening for The Pickle as we didn’t want to seem hypocritical. We didn’t want to just have a Christening for the sake of it, but we wanted to celebrate his birth with our family and friends and we didn’t want him to grow up wondering why his sister had been baptised and he hadn’t.

When I was younger I went to church every Sunday and it was a big part of my life, as my Mum and Nan were very religious and they were involved in all kinds of ‘churchy’ things, such as flower arranging, playing the organ, Sunday School teaching, singing in the choir…. You get the idea! So I have kept an open mind and will be happy to take my children to church every Sunday if they decide that’s what they want to do.

So after almost a year of ‘umming’ and ‘ahhing’ we decided to have The Pickle’s Christening and 1^st birthday tea on the same day – just a small celebration with family and close friends.

The baptism itself was lovely and very relaxed. The vicar asked everyone only to repeat as much as they felt they could and not to promise to commit to things they didn’t believe in. The Princess was asked to help light the candles at the start of the service and also helped to pour the water into the font. She felt very important and a big part of the day, especially when she was asked to hold the baptism candle on The Pickle’s behalf. The Pickle was surprisingly well behaved throughout the service and was fascinated when the vicar carried him over to look at the stained glass windows. He also received a Bible stories board book which I thought was a lovely idea and it seems to be The Pickle’s second favourite book at the moment (after his snake book of course) – today he started pointing to the bumble bee in it and trying to make a ‘bzzzzz’ sound, but so far it’s been more of a ‘b’ followed by a big raspberry!

The Christening suit was handmade by www.designerchristenings.co.uk and consisted of a romper with contrasting top and bottom half, so it gave the illusion of a shirt and trousers but in fact was a one piece. The waistcoat with tails was a separate piece, and the cravat tied with ribbon around the collar. To complete the outfit was a matching hat. Booties can also be made to match, but I thought it would be best for The Pickle to wear hard soled shoes as he’s just started to find his feet and I knew he’d spend the majority of the day practising his swagger! (Click through to read an in depth review of the suit).

The Princess’ Outfit

The Princess wore a purple chiffon waterfall dress from Tigerlily at Debenhams, with a grey woollen frill coat from Next to keep her warm on the 20 minute walk to church and back.

The style of the dress is ‘grown up’ but still very pretty and girly and The Princess really did look like a Princess in it! (Read my opinions of the dress in further detail here). The coat complemented the dress really well and kept The Princess warm and cosy - it was generally a pleasant, sunny day but it did get cold in the wind. (Read my thoughts on the coat in more detail here).

We continued our celebrations at home, where we had decorated the living room with a pale blue and deep purple colour scheme. The Princess and I had made paper mache letters to spell ‘Christening’ (find out more about how we made them here) and stuck them onto the banister in place of a banner, we had used a piece of blue satin fabric as a tablecloth and I’d bought some very pretty purple cake stands from ebay. We reused one of our Wedding decorations which was a glass ‘goldfish’ bowl filled with ivory foam flowers and added a few purple flowers to it and some cute little cupcake candles from www.christeningsandoccasions.co.uk.

The one decoration The Pickle was mesmerised by was the bunch of helium filled foil balloons. They were hearts and star shapes in purple, pale blue and silver (you can choose your own colours at www.balloonmonkey.co.uk at £29 for a bunch of 6 balloons). Their service was very good and the balloons arrived the day before, all ready in a bunch tied to a weight, ready to let out of the box. They were greeted with squeals of delight from The Pickle and lots of pointing! However, it soon became apparent that although he loved the idea of them from afar, he was not going to go anywhere near them until he had sussed them out! By late afternoon he had discovered that hitting them was actually quite fun (but only from the comfort of Daddy’s arms) and towards the end of the day we cut one of the balloons from the bunch and he was happy to hold onto the ribbon (luckily he had enjoyed more than his fair share of party food, so he didn’t float off anywhere…) 4 days later and the balloons are still going strong, 3 in a bunch on the table and the rest on the ceiling!

The food was mainly made by my Mum, including the cupcakes (lots of them – we still haven’t finished them yet and it is not doing any favours for my weight loss!), Belgian chocolate cake topped with raspberries and fantastic Noah’s Ark cake.

I made mini trifles in mini china cups (find out how I made them here) which looked very cute. The Pickle wore a ‘My Special Day’ bib from www.christeningsandoccasions.co.uk to help reduce the amount of chocolate cake smeared across his suit!

I made cake–slice shaped boxes and filled them with ferrero rocher choccies and a photo of The Pickle, to hand out as favors to our guests at the end of the afternoon. When things had quietened down a bit The Pickle had a well deserved nap and I got started on the leftover bottles of wine…