Why Princess Diana hated Christmas with the Windsors
It was Christmas time, 1967. Six-year-old Diana Spencer sat on the cold steps of Park House—her childhood home, located on the royal family’s Sandringham Estate in Norfolk. She is waiting for her mother, Frances, to return home. It was a gift she would never receive.
“Christmas was always the worst time for Diana,” the faith healer Simone Simmons write in Diana: Final words. “The season reminds her of her mother’s passing.”
Born into great privilege, Princess Diana’s first holidays were outwardly joyful and magical. But the holidays are also a time of enormous family conflict. IN Diana: The Story of a Princess, Phil Craig And Tim Clayton recalls Christmas 1967, when Diana’s separated parents united for their four children—Diana, Sarah, Jane, and Charles. Frances 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 her younger children, Diana and Charles, with her after the holidays, when John took custody of them from her.
“He refused to let [Diana and Charles] returned it to me and applied to the court to have them returned to Norfolk permanently, and this was granted,” Frances recalled, according to Diana goes looking for herself via Sally Bedell Smith. “The courts are closed over Christmas and there is nothing I can do…. I was devastated.
Princess Diana watched the heartbreaking scene unfold.
Her six-year-old “sat quietly at the foot of the cold stone stairs of her Norfolk home, clutching the wrought iron railing while a determined bustle surrounded her,” Andrew Morton write in Diana: True story in her own words. “She could hear her father loading luggage into the trunk, then Frances, trudging across the gravel front yard, the car door slamming and the car engine revving and slowly fading as her mother she drove across the street. Park House gate and disappeared from her life.”
From then on, the children mainly lived with their father and spent weekends with their mother. John tries to make up for it by giving the children expensive gifts during the holidays.
Morton writes: “Before the big day, Charles and Diana were given the catalog of Hamleys, a large toy store in London’s West End, and asked to mark the gifts they wanted Santa to bring.” . “Behold, on Christmas Day their wish came true, the stockings at the end of their bed bulging with presents.”
Diana’s father often took her and Charles out. Sandringhamwhere they spent the holiday season. “We always moved to Sandringham for holidays,” Diana recalled, according to Morton. “I went to see it Chitty Chitty Bang Bang, movie. We hate it so much. I hate going there. The atmosphere was always very strange when we went there, and I used to kick and hit anyone who tried to force us to go there, and dad insisted because it was rude.”
