The Mortifying Gift Princess Diana Had to Open on Christmas with Everyone Watching
A holiday invite to a royal estate sounds pretty magical to us. Just think of the fairy-tale-like setting and all the festive foods those lucky enough to be on the guest list get to enjoy for royal Christmas dinner and lunch. And who wouldn’t love a peek into the lives of the king, queen and other senior British royals behind closed doors? As tempting as it seems, however, we might want to be careful what we wish for. The late Princess Diana, a regular at the royal Christmas festivities after marrying into The Firm, reportedly “hated” spending the holidays with her royal in-laws at Sandringham, according to Andrew Morton, author of Diana: Her True Story in Her Own Words, and other royal biographers.
And it wasn’t just the fact that the Princess of Wales felt anything but comfortable around senior members of Charles’s family. There was also one particular royal Christmas tradition Diana couldn’t get her head around. In fact, she was “mortified” when she was first invited for the holidays and found out what she had gotten herself into. Read on to find out what happened during that fateful Christmas celebration.
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Which royal Christmas tradition didn’t Diana like?
The one Christmas tradition Diana couldn’t stand is the one most of us love the most: Christmas gifts! Diana loved shopping for presents for her family and friends, spent hours trying to find the perfect gift for everyoneand was excited to open the ones she received in return. But when she first spent Christmas with the royal family at Sandringham in 1981, she quickly learned that Santa worked a little differently in the royal world. As Morton reveals, Diana had no clue that the royals exchanged gag gifts on Christmas Eve. She had wrapped tons of expensive presents, such as designer clothes for both kids and adults, and we can only imagine her horror when she found out what the rest of the family had shown up withprobably similar to the disappointment she experienced four years later when her Christmas present for Charles backfired.
Fun fact: The royal family still follows the gag-gift tradition. Some highlights we’ve learned about over the years: Prince Harry gifted the late Queen Elizabeth II a shower cap with “Ain’t life a b**ch” emblazoned on the front, as per royal insider Omid Scobie, author of the bestselling book Finding Freedom: Harry and Meghan and the Making of a Modern Royal Family, while Princess Kate once surprised Harry with a “Grow Your Own Girlfriend” kit before he dated and later married Meghan Markle. Diana herself eventually embraced the tradition and made Prince William blush by hiding a calendar full of naked women in his Christmas stocking one year.
What gift did Diana find particularly mortifying?
According to Morton, Diana was “mortified” when she received a toilet-paper holder from Princess Anne on her very first Christmas with the royal family and had to unwrap it in front of Queen Elizabeth II and the rest of The Firm. Diana found the festivities as a whole “terrifying and so disappointing,” Morton says, but especially the “silly jokes that outsiders would find odd, but insiders understood.” Diana herself confessed to him that she clearly saw herself as the “outsider” in this scenario.
The unexpected gag present (in return for an expensive cashmere sweater!) came at a time when Diana was already stressed out. Not only was it her first Sandringham Christmas just five months after she married Charleswhich would have been nerve-racking enough as she, understandably, was trying to make a good impression on her new in-laws. But she was also pregnant with her first son, Prince William, and suffering from morning sickness. Princess Anne, on the other hand, seems to have a reputation for gifting bathroom items. She once reportedly wrapped a leather toilet seat for her brother, King Charles.
Why else did Diana “hate” Christmas with the royal family?
Questionable presents aside, there were a lot of other things Diana didn’t quite find jolly about the royal Christmas celebrations, including the stiff protocols, the orchestrated meals and multiple mandatory outfit changes each day, as well as the fact that everyone had to watch the late queen’s Christmas speech. Royal author Kitty Kelley talked to Diana’s hairdresser Richard Dalton for her book The Royals, who revealed, “She told me it was freezing cold, and dinner had to be over by three o’clock: ‘It’s three and time to watch me on TV,’ she’d say, imitating you-know-who. … Diana said it was a command performance.”
Paul Burrell, the late princess’s royal butler from 1987 to 1997, told Marie Claire that Diana saw it as her duty “to grin and bear” Christmas for the sake of her sons, Harry and William. “It’s like a pressure cooker, Sandringham at Christmas, of people and emotion,” he added. “Some can stand it, some can’t. Diana couldn’t stand it.” According to him, Diana sat through the mandatory part every year, then escaped as soon as she could.
And while none of the experts directly addressed the royal ritual of weighing each guest before and after the Christmas holidays, we can only assume that, considering Diana suffered from bulimia, she firmly detested that tradition too.
What other challenges did Diana have around the holidays?
Christmastime, it seems, was also a constant reminder for Diana that her marriage had failed. On Christmas Eve in 1990, she reportedly left Sandringham and drove to a nearby beach alone after one of many arguments with Charlesa scene that was later reenacted in the Spencer movie by Pablo Larran, even though the biopic was set at Christmas a year later. That very year, 1991, Charles and Diana could be seen walking apart from each other at the Christmas service, a fact that further fueled speculations that something was off. In December 1992, Diana and Charles made things official and split just weeks before Christmas. And while the separation was said to be “amicable,” it seems safe to say that Diana was anything but thrilled, especially considering that two years later, Charles confessed on British TV that he had cheated on her with Camilla Parker Bowles.
That year also marked the first time the princess spent the holidays without her sons, who, per royal tradition, went off to Sandringham while she was home alone. According to British tabloids, Diana went to bed early and cried herself to sleep. The following two years, she returned to the royal family estate for Christmas Eve but spent Christmas Day at Kensington Palace in London.
In 1995, Diana stopped going to Sandringham altogether, as she didn’t feel welcome there. She was alone for Christmas since, according to Burrell, “she didn’t have anyone with her to enjoy that day with.” Friends of the princess recalled receiving calls from Diana saying that she felt bored. Former royal chef Darren McGrady later said that Diana “insisted the staff spend their time with their families over Christmas,” so while they would leave food in the refrigerator for her to heat up, the princess was at Kensington Palace all by herself.
Were there any Christmas highlights for Diana?
While it seems safe to say that Christmas wasn’t her favorite time of the year, Diana did enjoy the time she shared with Charles over the holidays when they were still a newly married couple, according to Morton. On their first Christmas together, he reportedly gifted her an emerald ring in private (after the gag-gift incident), and she later wrote in a letter that she spent a long time “looking at it in a stupid gaze.”
Unsurprisingly, she also adored the time she got to spend with her sons during her 11 royal Christmases. And we don’t mean just the time at the official festivities. Diana made sure her sons also got a taste of what Christmas was like for commoners their age, taking them out to the theater for a Christmas play and to her own family’s holiday celebration with chocolates and presents they could pick themselves.
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AtReaders Digest, were committed to producing high-quality content by writers with expertise and experience in their field in consultation with relevant, qualified experts. We rely on reputable primary sources, including government and professional organizations and academic institutions as well as our writers personal experiences where appropriate. For this piece, Astrid Hofer tapped her experience as a London-based journalist with more than 20 years of experience covering topics including the British royal family. We verify all facts and data, back them with credible sourcing and revisit them over time to ensure they remain accurate and up to date. Read more about our team, our contributors and our editorial policies.
Sources:
- Diana: Her True Story in Her Own Words by Andrew Morton
- Finding Freedom: Harry and Meghan and the Making of a Modern Royal Family by Omid Scobie
- The Royals by Kitty Kelley
- Vanity Fair: “Why Princess Diana hated Christmas with the Windsors”
- New York Times: “Charles and Diana are separating ‘amicably'”
- British Vogue: “How much of Spencer is based in fact?”
- Time: “The true story behind Spencerand what it can tell us about Princess Diana”
- Marie Claire: “Princess Diana once hid a racy gift in Prince William’s stocking ‘to make him blush,’ former royal butler reveals”
- Marie Claire: “Sandringham at Christmas was ‘like a pressure cooker’ for Princess Diana, former royal butler says”
- Woman & Home: “Prince Harry’s inappropriate gift for the Queen raises a few eyebrows”
- Town & Country: “What happens at the annual royal family gift exchange”
- Express: “Prince William picked up ‘dreadful’ Christmas habit from Princess Diana”
- Yahoo! life: “‘Princess Diana would spend Christmas alone,’ says former royal chef”
- Mirror: “Princess Diana’s ‘sad’ last Christmas spent alone with reheated meal”
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