For a good part of his life Lady Diana he would have considered Christmas an obstacle to overcome. Whether in the company of the royal family or alone after her separation from Charles, the princess would almost never have been able to experience the festive period with serenity. In particular, Sandringham’s perfectly timed schedules, celebrations and age-old Christmas traditions would always be a burden to her. He would have almost been afraid of it. His young age, his character not inclined to slavishly respect customs, the lack of solidarity from the royals towards him and an overwhelming sense of loneliness would have contributed to transforming a moment of joy into a nightmare from which to escape as soon as possible.
“Smile and bear it”
Lady Diana “he hated” spend the Christmas at Sandringham with the royal family, recalled Andrew Morton, author of the book “Diana. Her True Story in Her Own Words” (1992. In general the holidays would never have been her favorite time of the year. In the latest episode of the podcast “The Sun’s Royal Exclusive Show”, quoted by People, the biographer Ingrid Seward revealed that the princess’s intolerance towards the immutable Christmas rituals of the Windsors was such that it pushed her to look for an escape route as soon as possible: “Diana had the habit of taking her leave after lunch. When things really weren’t going well at all, he had to fear these Christmas celebrations with the royal family.” Really “he always wanted, and sometimes succeeded, to just go to church and escape even before lunch.” A version of events also confirmed to Marie Claire UK by former butler Paul Burrell, who declared that for the princess, Christmas with the Windsors was like “a pressure cooker”but “he had to smile and bear it”, Why “he knew it was his duty.” Despite that “he wanted to escape as soon as he could… there were important personalities there who he couldn’t tolerate”.
“A purgatory”
In 2021, when the film “Spencer” was released, in which Christmas 1991 was recalled and the events that led to the separation between Charles and Diana, the former bodyguard of the princessKen Wharfe revealed some very sad anecdotes to People: “(Lady D) would lock herself in the kitchen, spending time with the chef or people like me, in the hope of passing the time and returning to London”. For her, Christmas with the royal family “it was purgatory”. In the book “The Royals” (1997), by Kitty Kelley, her hairdresser, Richard Dalton, also confirmed: “The Princess hated going to Sandringham for Christmas. He told me it was freezing cold and lunch had to be finished by three.”because the whole family had to gather in front of the television to watch the Queen’s speech. “Diana said it was a performance”. This anxiety, however, did not emerge at Sandringham or even after her marriage to Charles. It was already present in Diana’s soul. Parties with the Queen would have exacerbated and extended a malaise that had its roots in Lady D’s childhood and which would accompany her until the end of her life. If we really want to understand the reasons, we have to go back in time, to be precise to Christmas 1967.
At war for custody of their children
“Christmas was always one of the worst times for Diana…it reminded her of her mother leaving”wrote the healer and friend of Princess Simone Simmons in her book “Diana. The Last Word” (2017). As Phil Craig and Tim Clayton reported in the biography “Diana. Story of a Princess” (2001), Diana’s parents, already separated (the divorce came in 1969), began to fight each other for custody of their four children. At the time the family lived at Park House, on the Sandringham estate (Norfolk), where the people’s princess came into the world. He lived there until 1976, when his father inherited the better-known one Althorp House. According to the reconstruction of Vanity Fair UK, Frances Ruth Roche, Diana’s mother, would have liked to take her younger children, namely Diana and her brother Charles, with her to London after the holidays, but her ex-husband managed to beat her to the point and obtain them definitive custody. Frances, quoted by biographer Sally Bedell Smith in her work “Diana in Search of Herself” (1999), said: “The courts were closed for Christmas and I couldn’t do anything…I was distraught.”
Sad memories
Diana was only six years old when she saw her mother leave forever. “She sat silently at the bottom of the cold stone stairs in her home in Norfolk, clutching the wrought iron railing, while all around her was an unrelenting bustle“, reported Andrew Morton in the volume “Diana. Her True Story in Her Own Words” (1992). The future princess watched Frances helplessly “walk through the gates of Park House and out of his life.” This event marked her forever, we could even say that, in some way, it would have traumatized her. John SpencerDiana’s father, tried to compensate for this absence, especially at Christmas, with expensive gifts that his younger children could choose directly from the catalog of Hamleys, a large toy shop in London. The warmth of a family, the loving attention, however, are something else and the children understood this very well: in fact, Count Spencer often sent his children to Sandringham for the holidays. “We hated so much…having to go there,” Diana recalled in front of Morton. “The atmosphere was always very strange when we were there and I would kick anyone who tried to make us leave, but dad insisted…”.
The “permission” to unwrap presents
Christmas in the splendid Althorp House, a 90-room residence that belongs to Spencer family from 1508, it was no different. Diana had to put up with the presence of her hated stepmother Raine and her, apparently, rather extravagant ways. In this regard Andrew Morton revealed: “Christmas in Althorp with Raine was a bizarre comedy…(The stepmother) presided over the opening of presents like (she was) a pushy timekeeper. The children were allowed to open the gift she indicated and only after she looked at the clock to give the go-ahead and tear the paper away.” It was Raine herself, again mentioned by Vanity Fair UK, who revealed the state of agitation that had overwhelmed Diana at Christmas 1980, while waiting for Carlo to propose to her: “It’s very sad. She’s in the park, she’s walking alone and she’s crying because Carlo hasn’t come forward yet.”
“A stranger”
The rest is history, as they say. Charles and Diana married on 29 July 1981. Five months later the princess was at Sandringham, spending her first Christmas with her royal family. In his book Morton pointed out that at the time Lady D was already pregnant with Prince William, who was born on 21 June 1982. Despite the “morning sickness”Vanity Fair UK specified, Diana got busy looking for gifts for her relatives. Sophisticated and expensive thoughts. Apparently the young woman was unaware of the Windsors’ habit of exchanging amusing, often over-the-top and cheap gifts. So his disappointment was great when he gave Princess Anne a beautiful cashmere sweater and, in return, the Sun recalled, he received a toilet paper holder. It is not clear why the princess was not notified in time. To Andrew Morton he confessed: “The tension was high…I gave everyone gifts and Carlo signed the greeting cards. (It was) terrifying and unpleasant. No loud behavior, lots of tension, silly attitudes, stupid jokes that outsiders would find bizarre, but the (family) members understood. I was certainly an outsider.”
“Downstairs”
Just during Christmas 1981 something very serious happened, revealed by Morton in the documentary “Diana Confidentiel (2022): “That Christmas (Diana) was pregnant and had a violent argument with her husband Carlo. Following the argument, in desperation, she threw herself down the stairs.” Lady D it remained on the ground for many hours, until Elizabeth II found it by chance. “Fortunately neither the mother nor the child were harmed.”
The scale
There was one thing that the princess really couldn’t stand: the custom of Windsor to weigh themselves upon arriving at Sandringham and upon leaving, to see whether they enjoyed the sumptuous meals and, as a result, gained weight. An extravagance, explained the Express, which dates back to Edward VII. Nothing more than a joke which for Diana represented a real torment, a psychological torture that caused her great anxiety, given her eating disorders. We don’t know if the tradition is still respected today.
Christmas with William and Harry
Lady Diana did not rebel against the traditional Christmas a Sandringham especially for the children. The only thing she was interested in was ensuring William and Harry had a peaceful and happy holiday: “The weekend before Christmas all three disappeared into the living room, from there you could hear squeals and laughter”an insider told Us Weekly. Once upon a time, Paul Burrell revealed to Marie Claire UK, the princess gave her firstborn a gift “bold”: “Diana was certainly a witty person”apparently he enjoyed himself “embarrass your children. One year William was given (as a gift) a calendar of naked women. His mother wanted to make him blush and it worked.”
“Always alone”
After the shipwreck of marriage with Charles, in 1992, Lady Diana was no longer welcome at Sandringham. He remained in Althorp with his brother Charles, while the children remained with their father, but the absence of the boys weighed heavily: “He went to bed early, sad and in tears”an insider told the Mirror. In 1993 and 1994 the Queen allowed the princess to return to Norfolk, but by now it was clear to everyone, especially Diana, that the royal family no longer tolerated her presence. So Christmas, for her, transformed into an uninterrupted sequence of hours and days all the same, lonely, anguished without William and Harry. In a certain sense Diana had always felt alone even among the Windsors, during the Christmas celebrations, but in the last years of her life she experienced the darkest loneliness. “On Christmas Eve she called me and she was alone”a friend of his told Tina Brown, for her book “The Diana Chronicles” (2007), quoted by People. “Every time we talked, it was about tactics. What to do next”. Former royal chef Darren McGrady added, as reported by the Express: “It was always quite sad working for the princess the day before Christmas. William and Harry were at Sandringham and (she)…alone.”
“Sleeping pills”
The 1995 holidays were the most difficult. Simone Simmon, quoted by Vanity Fair UK, claims that when Diana asked her children what they wanted as a gift, she was told “may mum and dad get back together”. She would have burst into tears: that was, perhaps, the only thing she couldn’t give to little William and Harry. The royal family had by now excluded her completely, also furious because of the interview granted to the BBC in November of that year.
The princess “took a number of sleeping pills to get through the day” of celebration. Even in 1996 Lady D remained alone, after dismissing the staff to spend the holidays with the family. That was his last Christmas.