PEOPLE Christmas at the Palace

MAKING THE SEASON MERRY, BRIGHT & ROYAL Windsor Christmas Customs • Royal Celebrations Around the World PLUS A Palace Chef’s Dessert…

‘Someone somewhere today will remark that Christmas is a time for children. It’s an engaging truth, but only half the story. Perhaps it’s truer to say that Christmas can speak to the child within us all. Adults, when weighed down with worries, sometimes fail to see the joy in simple things, where children do not.… We have the chance to reminisce and see anew the wonder of the festive season through the eyes of our young children.… They teach us all a lesson—just as the Christmas story does that in the birth of a child, there is a new dawn with endless potential’—QUEEN ELIZABETH II, IN HER FINAL CHRISTMAS DAY ADDRESS, 2021…

AS KING CHARLES LOOKS TOWARD his third Christmas on the throne, he and Queen Camilla will assume one of their happiest duties: presiding over royal holiday festivities. This year we can expect a celebration much like Christmases past, with the sprawling family assembled at Sandringham House, on their 20,000-acre country estate in Norfolk. Once again the Windsors are expected to sit down for a black-tie Christmas Eve dinner, exchange inexpensive gag gifts laid out on trestle tables and tuck into a turkey lunch with all the trimmings—after greeting the public on the morning walk to services at St. Mary Magdalene Church. “People travel for miles to go to Sandringham to see them,” Dickie Arbiter, Elizabeth II’s former press secretary and author of On Duty With the Queen, told People. “And…

FROM THE TIME OF THE BBC’S 1922 founding, its first director hoped to deliver Christmas greetings from the King directly into people’s homes via a newly popular medium: radio. It would be 10 years before the then monarch, George V, agreed. On Dec. 25, 1932, subjects of the global British Empire heard the King, speaking into microphones set up at Sandringham, give a speech written by Rudyard Kipling that began, “I speak now from my home and from my heart to you all.” With that, a nearly unbroken annual ritual was born. The Christmas Day broadcast was carried on by George VI, by his daughter Elizabeth II and by King Charles III, who in his most recent 2023 speech from Buckingham Palace extolled the virtues of community service. “My heart…

SHE ISN’T THE FIRST MUSICAL ROYAL. Henry VIII composed folk songs in the 16th century that are still played today. His daughters Mary Tudor and Elizabeth I learned harpsichord and lute. But not since Princess Diana danced in a 1985 duet to “Uptown Girl” had a performance so captivated royal watchers. While hosting a 2021 holiday concert in Westminster Abbey, Princess Kate sat at the piano and played “For Those Who Can’t Be Here” before more than 1,200 guests, including health care workers whom she and Prince William had met during the COVID-19 pandemic. William beamed as his wife’s fingers lightly touched the keys while accompanying Scottish singer Tom Walker. “I thought she absolutely smashed the performance,” said Walker of Kate, who started taking music lessons at age 11. “It’s…

FOR BRITISH ROYALS, CHRISTMAS is a command performance. Princess Diana, who grew up in Norfolk on the Sandringham estate and was baptized at its St. Mary Magdalene Church, understood this even before she married into the Windsor clan at age 20. Beginning in 1981 she would spend nearly every holiday with her husband’s family—including some after she and Charles split in 1992, for this was the only way to have Christmas Day with her sons William and Harry. Queen Elizabeth had called Sandringham, where the family has celebrated since 1988, “an escape.” But for Diana it was a prison. Chef Darren McGrady, who worked for the princess, told the New York Post in 2021 that he once saw her walking the grounds at Christmastime wearing headphones. “I asked her what…