Naming Days (non religious) - How do they work?

[Miss_Dee]

This may seem a silly question but I really don't know. I grew up in a church going family so have been to loads of christening and baptisms of a variety denominations and a few naming days for friends kids which were all religious and held in a church. Parents promised to raise the child with a belief in God and God parents promised to support the parents in doing this. Even though DF is an athiest, he has said he's happy for Shoopy to be baptised/christened when she arrives because he knows it's important to me, but I don't think it would be right to make him promise to raise our child in a Christian household when those are not his beliefs (we've discussed how we're going to deal with us having different beliefs and how we're going to explain that to our kids ). The people we'd most likely choose to be Godparents would be in a similar situation to DF, so again I don't think it's right to ask them to promise to do something that goes against their own beliefs.

So how does a non religious naming day work? Is it actually a thing (I'm just assuming here it is)? Do you still have Godparents and are they called that?

[MummyNaomi]

We had a non religious naming day for DS and will do the same for DD. we combined it with the first birthday party and hired a celebrant to officiate for us, she had lots of wonderful ideas which we implemented and I'd written a letter to DS and she used parts of it in her reading which really personalized the ceremony. We then put on lunch and the rest of the day was more birthday party like - eg birthday cake smash etc

[boomba]

We had naming days for both our boys. They have god parents or guardians. And we used the elements water fire air eartn to name them. Also making our family invovled too.

Good luck xxx

[Lily Dust]

We gave DD a naming day. We were given the choice of what we wanted her 'godparents' called, things like Spiritual Guide/ Sponsor, Life Guide/ Advisor, Guardian, things like that. Like MummyNaomi we called a celebrant and she had wonderful ideas. She talked about what we had expressed we needed from them as the people we had chosen to walk with our daughter on her jorney through life. We picked verses and poems to read. We had a cake and a balloon release. We also had a box of wishes that people wrote wishes for DD down on paper and put them into the box for her to reflect on in years to come.