Why Diana hated Christmases with the Windsors

For many, Christmas means gifts, family meals and joy. For others, it sounds like a painful event. This was particularly the case for Lady Diana. To understand it better, we have to go back to the year 1967. Little Diana Spencer is six years old. Sitting on the cold steps of Park House, her childhood home on the royal family's Sandringham estate, she has only one wish this holiday season: that her mother Frances would return home. House.

Sentiment d’abandon

In 1967, as reported Vanity Fair Diana's mother, Frances Burke Roche has just left her father, Viscount John Spencer, for Peter Shand Kydd (whom she married two years later). The mother of four has moved to London and plans to take the two youngest, Diana and Charles. She immediately encountered opposition from her husband. “He refused to let them return to my home and petitioned the court for their permanent return to Norfolk, which was granted,” Frances said, as reported by American journalist Sally Bedell Smith in her book Diana in Search of Herself : Portrait of a Troubled Princess, a biography published in 1999. “The courts were closed for Christmas and I couldn't do anything…I was devastated.”

The little girl witnesses traumatic scenes. Like the moment when she “sat quietly at the bottom of the cold stone stairs of her Norfolk home, clinging to the wrought iron banister, while around her there was a determined commotion,” Andrew writes Morton in Diana: Her True Story in Her Own Words, the famous biography to which the Princess of Wales herself collaborated, in secret. “She could hear her father loading suitcases into the trunk of the car, then Frances, her footsteps crunching on the gravel of the yard, the slam of the car door closing and the sound of a car engine that would build up and then slowly fade away as his mother walked through the gates of Park House and out of his life.”

From then on, Diana, her brother and two sisters spent some weekends with their mother but mainly went to live with their father. Since the divorce, the family has lived at Althorp House, the Spencer family's historic mansion in Northamptonshire, England. John Spencer tries as best he can to compensate for the void left by Frances by spoiling his children with expensive gifts.

Stepmother

In the years following the Spencers' separation, Christmases at Althorp were not to Diana's taste. The fault lies with his mother-in-law, Raine. As Andrew Morton recounts, “she presided over the opening of the gifts like an unofficial timekeeper. Children were only allowed to open the gift she indicated, and only after looking at her watch to give the green light to tear the paper.

The years pass and Diana Spencer meets a man, the one who will change the course of her life: Prince Charles. She only dreams of one thing: to marry him. But the marriage proposal is delayed. Far too much for the taste of the young and beautiful aristocrat. In 1980, she was in all her states during the Christmas holidays: “She was very sad,” Raine Spencer reportedly confided to a friend. “She’s in the park, she’s walking alone and she’s crying because Charles isn’t asking her to marry him.” Diana finally married the son of Elizabeth II on July 29, 1981 before the eyes of the whole world, and therefore became a member of the royal family. In December 1981, the Princess of Wales spent her first Christmas with the Windsors. She was then pregnant with her first child, William, who was born on June 21, 1982. Two years later, a second child appeared: Harry.

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A “foreigner” at the Windsors

But the one we nickname “Lady Di” is unhappy. And Christmas at Sandringham changes nothing. Her hairdresser, Richard Dalton, even claimed that Diana hated them to the highest degree. “She told me it was freezing cold and dinner had to be finished by three o'clock: 'It's three o'clock and it's time to watch me on television,' she said, imitating you-know- Who. The royal family was due to watch the Queen's Christmas message on television. Diana said it was a performance on command,” we still read in Vanity Fair. “It was very tense,” Diana also admitted to journalist Andrew Morton. “I know what I gave, but I don't remember what I received in return. Isn't that horrible? I made all the gifts and Charles signed the cards. [C’était] terrifying and so disappointing. There was a lot of tension, silly behavior, ridiculous jokes that outsiders would find weird, and that only insiders would understand. I was definitely [une étrangère].” These confidences will also inspire the film Spencer by Pablo Larraín, released in 2021. In it, Kristen Stewart plays a Diana in 1991, out of breath and plagued by anxiety attacks, who has to deal with the royal family during the Christmas holidays.

Over the years, Diana does everything to escape the chore of Christmas. In December 1988, the press reported that the princess took her sons to see a Cinderella Christmas performance. According to Diana's brother, Charles Spencer, their father John also organized parties at the family estate for William and Harry, complete with acrobats and clowns. “They were impatiently awaiting this celebration,” Lord Spencer recalled to the Daily Expressas the article by Vanity Fair. “At tea time, we gave them little bags of pocket money so they could buy each other presents. Then they all stood outside and called Santa Claus, who arrived on a donkey with more presents for them. My father was so happy to give them this happiness.

Despite everything, the Princess of Wales never ended up enjoying the holidays? In any case, this is what the former editor-in-chief of Tatler Tina Brown dans The Diana Chronicles (1997). “I received calls from her on Christmas Eve and she was alone,” a friend recalls for example to the journalist. The rest is known to everyone: unhappy in her marriage, Diana separated from Prince Charles, officially in December 1992. Their divorce was finalized four years later. From then on, the “Princess of Hearts” is no longer welcome at the Windsors’ Sandringham Christmas. “Diana understood that the boys had to be with their grandparents and their father on Christmas Day,” former butler Paul Burrell later confided to the Sunday People. “She would have deprived them of their inheritance if she had said no.”

Home “icy”

According to Richard Kay, editor-in-chief of Daily Mailin 1993, a year after her highly publicized separation from Charles, Diana still joined the royal family at Sandringham on Christmas Eve. She spends the night there and goes to mass with her. “But she didn’t stay for lunch. Instead, she returned home to Kensington Palace alone and spent the rest of the day there before flying to Washington to be with friends. The same thing happened in 1994, but Diana had the feeling of having received a “frosty” welcome from the other members of the royal family,” the tabloid journalist would have brought, as the 'echo The Mirror . A source also told Kay: “Diana didn't feel welcome at all. She could see that her presence made everyone tense and uncomfortable. She joined them for the boys' sake, but it didn't work.”

Diana won't make any more effort after that. As former royal chef Darren McGrady recounted, it was alone that she spent her last Christmas, in 1996. “It was always quite sad when you worked with the princess on Christmas Eve,” he recalled to royal correspondent Omid Scobie. “William and Harry were going to Sandringham and Princess Diana was there, alone. “She insisted that staff members spend time with their families for Christmas and that we leave food in the fridge.” Diana died on August 31, 1997, in Paris, in an accident under the Alma bridge. Without either of her two sons having any chance of spending Christmas with her again.

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