Princess Diana 'Hated' Christmas With the Royal Family And Would 'Escape' As Soon As She Could
For many, including those in the royal family, Christmas is meant to soften the edges of a long year, an excuse to gather, indulge, and briefly switch off. For Princess Diana, however, the festive season did the opposite. Her Christmases at Sandringham were only about royal tradition and rigid routine, but became some of the most emotionally taxing days of her life.
And the reality of her unhappy holidays with the Royal Family was well documented. Diana herself admitted she “hated” Christmas at Sandringham, describing the experience as “highly fraught” in taped conversations with royal biographer Andrew Morton. What was meant to be a celebration, she said, felt anything but. The atmosphere, Diana recalled, was “terrifying and so disappointing.”
Morton later expanded on those confessions, revealing just how overwhelming the festivities became for her. “Diana used to always leave after lunch. When things were really not going at all well. She was to dread these royal family Christmases,” he said on The Sun’s Royal Exclusive show last December. “Sometimes she escaped even before lunch and just did the church.”
That discomfort began early. According to Morton, Diana’s unease set in during her very first royal Christmas in 1981, just five months after her wedding to then-Prince Charles and while she was pregnant with Prince William. Despite battling morning sickness, Diana reportedly went out of her way to buy thoughtful, often expensive gifts for her new family, Vanity Fair had noted. What she didn’t anticipate was the family’s tradition of exchanging joke presents instead.
The discovery left her deeply unsettled. Diana gave Princess Anne a cashmere sweater; in return, she received a toilet paper holder. The mismatch symbolized her larger struggle to find her footing. “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,” Diana reportedly told Morton. She described an environment marked by “no boisterous behavior, lots of tension, silly behavior, silly jokes that outsiders would find odd, but insiders understood.” And from it, her conclusion was, “I sure was [an outsider.]”
At Sandringham, tradition ruled the day. Christmas followed a strict schedule—church at St. Mary Magdalene, lunch, and then the monarch’s televised address. For Diana, that rigidity only heightened her sense of confinement. Her hairdresser, Richard Dalton, later told Kitty Kelley for her book The Royals that Diana found the experience bleak and joyless. “The princess just hated going to Sandringham for Christmas,” he said. “‘It’s 3 and time to watch me on TV,’ she’d say, imitating you-know-who.” Diana described the viewing of the Queen’s speech as compulsory, calling it “a command performance.”
As her marriage deteriorated, the strain of Christmas intensified. A friend recalled receiving calls from Diana on Christmas Eve when she was alone, already strategizing how to survive the days ahead. “Whenever we talked it was all about tactics. What to do next?” the friend told Tina Brown for The Diana Chronicles. Her former butler, Paul Burrell, echoed that sentiment years later, describing Christmas as a “pressure cooker” for the princess. Speaking to Marie Claire, he said Diana felt compelled to “grin and bear it” because she understood it as part of her duty. “She would escape it as soon as she could,” Burrell said. But it never felt right for her.