This Christmas will mark seven years since Prince Harry last spent the festive period with the Royal Family. He previously opened up about one of his Sandringham visits, during which he received an unusual gift…
Prince Harry hasn’t spent Christmas with the royal family since 2018(Image: WireImage)
Another year, another Christmas that Prince Harry will spend away from the Royal Family.
Harry, Meghan, and their two children will spend the festive period in California, thousands of miles away from Sandringham, where the King will host his loved ones. The last time Harry and Meghan spent Christmas with the royals was in 2018 when Meghan was pregnant with their first child, Archie.
But with relations between the couple and the Royal Family still frosty, they will once again be absent from the celebrations. As will Harry’s disgraced uncle Andrew, who has this year been stripped of all his titles over the ever-evolving Jeffrey Epstein scandal.
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Harry and Meghan will spend Christmas in California, many miles away from the royal family(Image: Instagram @meghan )
Not that Harry – by his own admission – will be missing much. Harry previously spoke about Christmas at Sandringham in his tell-all memoir Spare, recalling one far from impressive gift he was once given.
In one passage, he told how he received a ‘cold-blooded’ Christmas gift from his great-aunt Princess Margaret, the Queen’s younger sister. “Standing before my pile, I chose to open the smallest present first,” he wrote. “The tag said: ‘From Aunt Margo.’ I looked over, called out: ‘Thank you, Aunt Margo!’ “I do hope you liked it, Harry,” she reportedly replied.
“I tore off the paper,” described the duke. “It was… A biro? I said: ‘Oh. A biro. Wow.’ She said: ‘Yes. A biro.’ “But it wasn’t just any biro, she pointed out. It had a tiny rubber fish wrapped around it. “I said: ‘Oh. A fish biro! OK.’ I told myself: ‘That is cold-blooded.”
Harry opened up about a gift he received from his great-aunt Princess Margaret(Image: Popperfoto via Getty Images)
Harry went on to say he made a surprising connection between himself and Margaret as he got older. “It struck me that Aunt Margo and I should’ve been friends. We had so much in common. Two Spares,” he said. “Her relationship with Granny wasn’t an exact analogue of mine with Willy, but pretty close. The simmering rivalry, the intense competition (driven largely by the older sibling), it all looked familiar.”
Harry also compared his mother to Princess Margaret. “Aunt Margo also wasn’t that dissimilar from Mummy. Both rebels, both labelled as sirens. (Pablo Picasso was among the many men obsessed with Margo).”
Harry drew comparisons between Margaret and himself – as well as his mother, Princess Diana(Image: Tim Graham Photo Library via Getty Images)
The British royal family has a long-standing tradition of exchanging inexpensive joke or gag gifts on Christmas Eve, rather than lavish presents. Some of the cheeky gifts exchanged over the years have been very comical – including a leather toilet seat for then-Prince Charles, a grow-your-own girlfriend kit for Prince Harry and a shower cap for the late Queen with ‘ain’t life a b****’ emblazoned across it.
Speaking on Channel 4’s 2020 documentary ‘A Very Royal Christmas: Sandringham Secrets’, royal expert Katie Nicholl noted: “If you can achieve something that is tongue in cheek, and will have the Queen laughing, then you’ve really done well that Christmas. The more kitsch, the better. Nothing ostentatious, or terribly expensive or lavish, that doesn’t really go down well with the Queen.”
With that in mind, Princess Anne opted for a highly-unusual present for her older brother, King Charles, on one occasion – a leather toilet seat. Former royal press secretary Dickie Arbiter explained why this gift was particularly apt on the show, saying: “What is it we used to call the loo? We would call it the throne. You go and sit on the throne.
“So buying a leather-bound loo seat was really Princess Anne’s way of saying, ‘Here you are, you’ve got your own personal throne!”