When it comes to royal traditions, spending Christmas at Sandringham seems to have always been a nonnegotiable. But for Princess Diana, it appeared to be one of the family events that she hated the most. According to insiders, not only did Diana “dread “spending Christmas with the royals, but she’d also leave early. It’s surprising Queen Elizabeth let her get away with that!
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Diana would leave family Christmas early when she could.
Arthur Edwards, a photographer who has worked with the royal family for decades, told The Sun that Diana would leave Sandringham on Christmas as early as possible after her marriage to Charles had ended.
âFor many years, our Queen Camilla, she would leave after [Christmas] lunch and go and spend time with her own family down in Wiltshire,” he said.Â
Royal expert Ingrid Seward added, “Well, Diana used to leave after lunch. When things were really not going at all well, she was to dread these royal family Christmases. And sometimes she escaped even before lunch and just did the church.â
Still, she knew it was her 'duty' to go each year.
“Christmas for her was her duty to be there with her Harry and William and estranged husband, and the Royal Family,” Diana’s former butler, Paul Burrell, told Marie Claire. “She was still a member of the Royal Family in those days and she had to grin and bear it.”
Christmas was 'very sad' for her in those years.
As Marie Claire pointed out, the years that Paul worked with the royals were at the end of Diana’s marriage to Charles, so it wasn’t exactly a happy time to begin with, and it sounds like Diana simply couldn’t handle it.
“She would escape it as soon as she could but there were huge personalities in there she couldnât cope with,” he said. “Itâs like a pressure cooker, Sandringham at Christmas, of people and emotion. Some can stand it, some canât. Diana couldnât stand it.”
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The holidays were hard for Diana even after her divorce.
Even after she didn’t have a familial obligation to attend Christmas at Sandringham, William and Harry did, and it must have been pretty sad for her to spend Christmas away from her boys.
“Itâs not a day she really relished or looked forward to because she didnât have anyone with her to enjoy that day with,” Paul added.
Diana stopped going to Sandringham in 1995.
During the final holiday seasons of her life, she decided to find her own joy and take the rare solo time as 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,” according to Vanity Fair.
She’d also travel somewhere warm over the New Year holiday, spending her final holiday season in Barbuda.
