How Princess Diana Broke Protocol During Her First Christmas With the Windsors

She wasn't privy to their gift-giving tradition.

The first holiday with your significant other's family is always stressful, but not everyone's in-laws are literal royalty. So imagine how Princess Diana must have felt when she celebrated her first Christmas with the Windsors and ended up breaking royal protocol to top it off. 

According to Diana's biographer Andrew Morton, author of the book Diana: Her True Story in Her Own Words, the princess "hated" spending Christmas with the royal family after her first celebration turned out to be a disaster. Detailing Diana's uncomfortable experience, Morton revealed that the new royal was pregnant with Prince William at the time and suffered from morning sickness. Despite her pregnancy ailments, Diana still took the time to "to buy her new family members thought and expensive gifts," according to Vanity Fair. 

However, she was "mortified" on Christmas Even when she discovered that the royals only gave each other silly gag gifts. For example, she gifted Princess Anne a cashmere sweater and got a toilet paper holder in return.  

“It was highly fraught,” Diana told 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." 

She added, "I sure was [an outsider].”

Meanwhile, her hairdresser Richard Dalton shared a similar sentiment of Diana's distaste for the holidays with the royals. “The Princess just hated going to Sandringham for Christmas,” Dalton recalled, per Kitty Kelley’s book 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.”

Things only got worse after her marriage to Charles began to disintegrate in the late 1980s. “I used to get calls from her on Christmas Eve and she was alone,” a friend of Diana's said in Tina Brown's The Diana Chronicles. “Whenever we talked it was all about tactics. What to do next.” 

Diana and Charles formally separated on December 9, 1992 and weeks later she would have to spend her first Christmas away from her sons.