When does a child have to be named in Denmark?

16 September 2026 · 5 min

Nobody hands a Danish family the date of a barnedåb. What arrives instead is a deadline, sitting quietly in the paperwork after a birth: the child has to be named before it turns six months. Church, lunch, room and guest list all line up behind that one sentence, usually while the parents are far too tired to notice it happening.

Six months sounds generous when the baby is three weeks old. It is shorter than it looks, because the first part of it belongs to the baby rather than to the calendar.

Six months, and the two ways to meet it

The rule is short, and it holds whatever the family thinks about churches. Before the child reaches six months, the name has to be on the record.

There are two routes to it.

The first is a christening. The child is named at the service and the registration follows from that, which is why a barnedåb settles the paperwork and the celebration in one morning.

The second is naming without a christening, which is done on borger.dk. No service, no parish diary, no waiting for a free Sunday.

What matters for your planning sits underneath both routes: naming and celebrating are separate acts. The deadline belongs to the naming. The party can go wherever your family wants it.

Why one line in the rules decides the date of your lunch

Families who choose the church usually want both on the same day, and once that is decided the chain runs by itself. The parish offers the Sundays it has. You take one of them. The service ends around midday, the family is hungry, and everybody drives on to wherever lunch is.

So the date of the meal was never really chosen. It was set months earlier by a deadline, then narrowed to whichever Sundays the church had free, and by the time the parents start ringing venues the day is not open to negotiation at all.

That is the difference between a christening lunch and almost any other family party. A birthday, a jubilæum or a reception can move a fortnight to suit a room. This one cannot.

The practical consequence is worth saying plainly. Ring the parish first and the venue second, but ring the venue in the same week, not in the same month.

Counting backwards through the months

An order that survives a house where nobody is sleeping:

• Settle the route early, church or borger.dk. Everything else hangs on it, and nothing else can start until it is decided.
• If it is the church, ask the kirkekontor which Sundays are free, and ask for the answer in writing.
• Book the room in the week the date is confirmed. You do not need a guest list yet, and no venue has ever held a date for a family that was still making up its mind.
• Then the headcount, which shapes the day more than the menu does. Our guide to how many guests to invite to a christening sorts that out from the faddere outward.
• Then the food, the cake and who speaks. These can wait until the final month, and they usually do.
• Then the invitations. Relatives flying into Copenhagen need far more notice than the ones in the next postcode.

If the deadline is close and you are not ready to celebrate

Name the child and stop the clock. It costs you nothing where the party is concerned.

Naming on borger.dk meets the requirement on its own, and the celebration can then happen when your family is actually ready: a christening later in the year, or a naming lunch in the spring when the grandparents can travel and the baby's mother has slept more than four hours at a stretch.

Families split the two more often than the forums suggest, and there is no prize for exhaustion. A calm lunch in May beats a hurried one in February, and a baby who can sit up is a great deal easier to pass around a table than one who cannot.

What to look for in a room when the guest of honour is four months old

A christening lunch has a shape that most party venues never have to think about. It is a daytime meal, it starts early, and a good share of the room is either very old or very small.

Three things are worth checking wherever you look.

• How far the car is from the chair. Arriving with a pram, a changing bag and a car seat turns any long walk into a project. Ours is free and on the site itself, which on a Sunday morning in Copenhagen decides more about the arrival than the menu does.
• Whether the room is one room. Højdevej 59 is a single hall for 30 to 120 guests, so the family is never spread across two floors and nobody misses the speech to the child.
• Whether the food is cooked in the building. Ours is. Maiya Nepali Kitchen is part of the same house, so a lunch running late because the service overran is a conversation with the people already in the room.

Two more points that belong to a party of this size. The hall has a floor of thirty: a christening of twenty four is welcome exactly as it is, and the room is worked out as though thirty had come, while every plate and every glass is counted by the head. Children aged 5 to 12 pay half the menu price. At a christening that is never a small detail, because a good part of your guest list turns up with cousins in tow. What the hall fee already includes is listed on the prices page.

Read what a christening here involves, settle your route while the baby is still small, and book a visit at midday, which is the hour your own lunch would run.