Is it wrong to serve champagne at a baby shower?

I am hosting high tea for a girlfriend's baby shower. I plan to serve champagne but my sister says that because my friend is expecting, we should have only non-alcoholic drinks. All the big hotels that do high tea seem to have champagne.

High tea, schmigh tea. My inner pedant lost this battle five years and a million macarons ago, but I maintain my rage regardless. High tea is something that ye olde English yokels, coal miners and factory hands ate for their evening meal after trudging home from the fields/pits/dark satanic mills. It involved foods like eggs, pies or ham, and a dispiriting absence of pistachio-iced cupcakes and champagne. What you are planning - assuming it involves cucumber sandwiches, dainty cakes and dressed-up, sugared-up ladies squealing ''Oooh, I really shouldn't'' - is afternoon tea.

Afternoon tea is a repast invented by the British aristocracy to pass the idle hours between lunch and dinner - having too little to do mid-afternoon was no great problem for the high-tea-eating labouring classes.

Where were we? Champagne for the baby shower. To my mind, few occasions would not benefit from the addition of a glass of champagne. Imagine how much more festive tax audits or parent-teacher interviews could be with a glass of good sparkles. Indeed, at some occasions, champagne is almost de rigueur - weddings, 21st birthdays and spring racing parties. But afternoon tea is not among these. It's not necessary to serve sparkling wine - or even traditional to do so - just an option.

Whether you or your sister are right depends on what you think the guest of honour wants. She may be looking forward to a small ration of champagne. If so, she is unlikely to drink more than a token amount, so choose quality over quantity when you're shopping. (A note to the reproductive police: this is not a medical column, I am not advocating drinking in pregnancy, and no correspondence will be entered into.)

Alternatively, your guest might have spent the past seven months resolutely on the wagon, feeling left out and repelled at the spectacle of all you non-pregnant people swilling mojitos on Friday nights. If that is the case, she will probably enjoy the afternoon and your company more if no one is drinking, in which case, it would be better to leave champagne off the menu, break out the good china and serve actual tea.