Princess Diana at a Christmas Day service at Sandringham Church, 25th December 1990.by Jayne Fincher/Princess Diana Archive/Getty Images.
It’s Christmastime in 1967. A six-year-old Lady Diana Spencer sits on the cold steps of Park House—her childhood home, located in the royal family’s Sandringham Estate in Norfolk. She is waiting for her mother, Frances, to come back home. It is a present she will never receive.
“Christmas was always the worst of times for Diana,” faith healer Simone Simmons writes in Diana: The Last Word. “The season reminded her of her mother’s departure.”
Born into immense privilege, Princess Diana’s early holidays were outwardly joyful and magical. But the holidays were also a time of immense family strife. In Diana: Story of a Princess, Phil Craig and Tim Clayton recall the Christmas of 1967, when Diana’s separated parents put on a united front for their four children—Diana, Sarah, Jane, and Charles. Frances had left John for Peter Shand Kydd (whom she later married in 1969), embarrassing her powerful ex-husband. She had moved to London and planned to take the younger children, Diana and Charles, with her after the holidays, when John took away her custody of them.
“He refused to let [Diana and Charles] return to me and applied to the court for their permanent return to Norfolk, and this was granted,” Frances recalled, per Diana in Search of Herself by Sally Bedell Smith. “The courts were closed for Christmas, and I could do nothing…. I was devastated.”
Princess Diana watched as the heartbreaking scene unfolded.
Her six-year-old self “sat quietly at the bottom of the cold stone stairs at her Norfolk home, clutching the wrought iron banisters while all around her there was a determined bustle,” Andrew Morton writes in Diana: Her True Story in Her Own Words. “She could hear her father loading suitcases into the trunk of the car, then Frances, crunching across the gravel forecourt, the clunk of the car door being shut and the sound of a car engine revving and then slowly fading as her mother drove through the gates of Park House and out of her life.”
From then on, the children primarily lived with their father, and spent some weekends with her mother. John tried to overcompensate by showering the children with expensive gifts at the holidays.
“Before the big day, Charles and Diana were given the catalogue for Hamleys, a large toy shop in London’s West End, and told to tick what presents they wanted Father Christmas to bring,” Morton writes. “Lo and behold, on Christmas Day their wishes came true, the stockings on the end of their beds bulging with goodies.”
Diana’s father often packed her and Charles off to Sandringham, where they spent the holiday season. “We were always shunted over to Sandringham for holidays,” Diana recalled, per Morton. “Used to go and see Chitty Chitty Bang Bang, the film. We hated it so much. I hated going over there. The atmosphere was always very strange when we went there, and I used to kick and fight anyone who tried to make us go over there, and Daddy was most insistent because it was rude.”
Christmas at Althorp—the Spencer estate where the family moved when Diana’s father inherited the title of earl in 1975—was not much better due to the presence of Diana’s hated stepmother, Raine. “Christmas at Althorp with Raine Spencer in charge was a bizarre comedy, a sharp contrast to the extravagances of Park House,” Morton writes. “She presided over the present-opening like an officious timekeeper. The children were only allowed to open the present she indicated, and only after she had looked at her watch to give the go-ahead to tear the paper off.”
Despite her own misery, Diana wanted to spread holiday cheer. One year, she decided to give a surly, angry night watchman at Althorp one of her presents. Although most on the estate feared the curt guard, the intuitive Diana sensed that he was deeply lonely. When she gave him the gift, he burst into tears.
The Christmas season would continue to be a fraught time for the young Lady Diana. In 1980, during her courtship with then Prince Charles, Diana spent Christmas in a tizzy. “She is very sad,” Raine Spencer told a friend. “She is in the park, and she is walking alone, and she is crying because Charles is not proposing.”
Things were not much better at Sandringham. The press descended onto the estate, already in full Dianamania. According to Morton:
The Queen shouted: ‘Why don’t you go away?’ at the crowd of hacks, while Prince Charles heckled: ‘A very happy New Year, and to your editors a particularly nasty one!’ Prince Edward was even said to have fired a shotgun over the head of a Daily Mirror photographer.
She was mortified on Christmas Eve, when she discovered that the royal family only gave each other silly gag gifts. While she gave Princess Anne a cashmere sweater, Anne gifted her a toilet paper holder. However, she was heartened by her private time with Prince Charles when he gifted her a spectacular emerald ring. “I spend most of my time looking at it in a stupid gaze,” she wrote in a letter at the time.
Prince Charles believed everything was going wonderfully. “We’ve had such a lovely Christmas—the two of us,” he wrote to a friend. “It has been extraordinarily happy and cosy being able to share it together.”
But storm clouds were brewing. Once the royal family caravanned to Sandringham for their New Year’s holiday, Diana’s mood darkened. In January, a distraught Diana hurled herself down a staircase, to the horror of the royal family. From then on, holidays at Sandringham were anything but jolly for the then Princess of Wales.
“The Princess just hated going to Sandringham for Christmas,” her hairdresser Richard Dalton recalled, per Kitty Kelley’s The Royals. “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. The royal family had to watch the Queen’s Christmas message on television. Diana said it was a command performance.”
The endless meals, protocol, and strange games that were part of a royal Christmas represented everything Diana despised. “It was highly fraught,” she told Andrew Morton. “I know I gave, but I can’t remember being a receiver. Isn’t that awful? I do all the presents, and Charles signs the cards. [It was] terrifying and so disappointing. No boisterous behaviour, lots of tension, silly behaviour, silly jokes that outsiders would find odd, but insiders understood. I sure was [an outsider].”
By the late 1980s, Diana had made it abundantly clear to both the family and the press that she hated Christmas with the Windsors. In 1988, The Sunday People reported that she often escaped to London during the six-week holiday at Sandringham, instructing her staff at Kensington to keep everything ready for her.
Diana also made sure her sons had a break from the siffling routine. In December of 1988, the Daily Mirror reported that she took Prince William and Prince Harry to see a Christmas pantomime of Cinderella. Joined by her sister Jane and Princess Anne and their children, she thrilled in joining in on the fun of the silly stage show. The arrival of Sarah Ferguson, Duchess of York, also livened things up. There were also impromptu discos and wild dinner parties, where a boisterous Diana and Sarah would break out into a spontaneous cancan.
She would also take her sons to visit her father and step-mother at Althrop, where the boys were spoiled rotten. According to Diana’s brother, Charles Spencer, their father, John, would throw parties on the family’s estate for William and Harry that featured acrobats and clowns.
“They’d long for this party,” Lord Spencer recalled, per the Daily Express. “At tea, they’d be given little bags of chocolate money to buy presents for themselves. Then they’d all stand outside and call on Father Christmas, and he’d come on a donkey with more presents for them. My father was so happy giving that happiness to them.”
Although the holidays were a trying time for Diana, she still reveled in gift-giving. She admitted to a friend that she could never wait until Christmas Eve to open her presents. Most importantly, she wanted to ensure her beloved boys had a wonderful time. “William and Harry had the best Christmas ever, and I am exhausted just trying to keep up with them as they rush around,” she wrote to a friend in 1987. “Anyway, at least they sleep well.”
But when the children were snug in the beds, Diana’s sense of despair over her disintegrating marriage could not be ignored. According to the Daily Express, she frequently made desperate calls to friends complaining about how bored she was. Tina Brown writes in The Diana Chronicles that this continued in later years: “I used to get calls from her on Christmas Eve and she was alone,” a friend recalled, according to Brown. “Whenever we talked it was all about tactics. What to do next.”
On New Year’s Eve of 1989, she made the mistake of calling her lover James Gilbey, unaware that the press had tapped her phone (these “Squidgygate” tapes would be released in 1992). She complained that her husband was making her life torture, and the Queen Mother had spent lunch casting her pitying glances. “I was very bad at lunch, and I nearly started blubbing,” she told Gilbey. “I just felt really sad and empty and thought: ‘Bloody hell, after all I’ve done for this fucking family.’”
Things came to a head over the Christmas of 1991 (fictionalized in Pablo Larraín’s 2021 film, Spencer). Diana had had enough and could barely contain her rage and disappointment. She decided to needle her husband’s family.
“During dinner one evening, Diana tentatively raised the question of the future of the British monarchy in a federal Europe,” Morton writes. “The Queen, Prince Charles, and the rest of the royal family looked at her as if she were mad and continued with their debate on who had shot the last pheasant of the day, a discussion which occupied the rest of the evening.”
Princess Diana and Prince Charles formally separated in December 1992, Diana decided to stay away for Christmas at Sandringham, knowing it meant being separated from her beloved boys. “Diana understood that the boys had to be with their grandparents and father on Christmas Day,” former butler Paul Burrell later told The Sunday People. “She’d be depriving them of their heritage if she’d said no.”
But that first Christmas away from her sons was painful. With her family at Althorp, Diana was inconsolable. “She went to bed early, glum and in tears,” a friend apparently told the Sunday Mirror at the time. “She sobbed herself to sleep.”
In 1993 and 1994, Diana compromised, spending Christmas Eve at Sandringham. After church and the traditional royal walkabout, she sped back to Kensington Palace and spent Christmas Day alone. But she soon felt like she made everyone uncomfortable and stopped going to Sandringham altogether.
For the last few Christmas days of her life, Diana was alone, which worried friends and employees. But according to her butler Paul Burrell, these solitary holidays, with all her employees and their families, became a cozy tradition for Diana—a chance to center herself and relax, noshing on cold turkey and her favorite holiday trifle and watching soap operas and movies like Brief Encounter and The Wizard of Oz.
“She used to sit and write, play music from the ballets and relax. I don’t think she felt lonely at all,” he told The Sunday People. “She would then slob about in her tracksuit bottoms and an old jumper, sprawled out on the floor, writing hundreds of thank-you letters to everyone who had given her presents. To her, that was so important. She thought if people went to all the trouble of sending her a present, the least she could do was thank them.”
Friends still treasure Diana’s highly personal Christmas greetings. She also was an obsessive gift giver, although she had to have a 50-pound limit for her gaggle of godchildren. She loved picking the perfect gifts for her sons. “She’d spend hours looking for jokey things for their stockings,” Paul Burrell once recalled. “One year, Harry got fake dog poo.”
But she could not get them what they really wanted. “In 1995 she asked them what they wanted for Christmas, and they both said, ‘For Mummy and Daddy to get back together.’ Diana burst into tears, because that was what she wanted too,” Simone Simmons recalled.
Perhaps this was what set Diana off during Christmas of 1995. The explosive Panorama interview had just aired in November, and Diana seemed to be paranoid and angry. At a staff Christmas party in December, Diana accosted her children’s part-time minder Tiggy Legge-Bourke, who she was convinced was having an affair with Prince Charles. A false rumor that Legge-Bourke had aborted Charles’s baby sent her over the edge.
“She bore down on the unsuspecting Tiggy with her most compassionate Diana smile,” Brown writes in The Diana Chronicles. “‘Hello, Tiggy, how are you?’ she purred. ‘So sorry to hear about the baby.’ The insulted nanny fled the room in tears.”
Infuriated, Legge-Bourke hired a lawyer and demanded a retraction. At her wits’ end, on December 20, 1995, Diana received a letter from Queen Elizabeth insisting that she and Charles divorce quickly, stating that it was “in the best interests of the country.”
A seething Diana again spent Christmas alone. In what would become a tradition, she would jet to a vacation in the sun over the New Year’s holiday, far away from the gloom and snow of England.
The divorce was finalized on August 28, 1996, leading Diana to vow “that she would never again submit herself to the ‘ordeal’ of a royal Christmas,” Simmons recalls.
After spending Christmas alone again on what would be her last Christmas season, Diana escaped to the K Club in Barbuda with only her personal assistant, Victoria Mendham. There she played tennis, swam in the ocean, and played with children she met on the beach. Away from the pain of her family history, and her disastrous relationship with the royals, one hopes she found a momentary glint of holiday cheer.
