Prince Harry enforces a royal tradition on his children at Christmas (Image: Getty)
Prince Archie Harrison and Princess Lilibet Diana have to follow an unusual royal Christmas rule whereby they open their presents not on Christmas Day, but on Christmas Eve.
The tradition, written about by in his controversial memoir Spare, is a nod to his family’s Anglo Saxon heritage. He makes reference to this tradition on a couple of occasions in Spare, including when he talks about Christmas in 2020 before disaster struck his Montecito home.
He wrote: “It was Christmas Eve. We FaceTimed with several friends, including a few in Britain. We watched Archie running around the tree. And we opened presents. Keeping to the Windsor family tradition.
“One present was a little Christmas ornament of…the Queen! I roared. What the-? Meg had spotted it in a local store and thought I might like it. I held it to the light. It was Granny’s face to a T.
“I hung it on an eye-level branch. It made me happy to see her there. It made Meg and me smile. But then Archie, playing around the tree, jostled the stand, shook the tree, and Granny fell. Pieces lay all over the floor. I grabbed a dustpan and swept up the pieces.”
Prince Harry and Meghan Markle (Image: Getty)
Elsewhere in Spare, Harry goes into greater detail about the Christmas Eve tradition: “The whole family gathered to open gifts on Christmas Eve, as always, a German tradition that survived the anglicizing of the family surname from Saxe-Coburg-Gotha to Windsor.
“We were at Sandringham in a big room with a long table covered with white cloth and white name cards. By custom, at the start of the night, each of us located our place, stood before our mound of presents.
“Then suddenly, everyone began opening at the same time. A free-for-all, with scores of family members talking at once and pulling at bows and tearing at wrapping paper.”
Whilst Harry wrote in his 2023 tome about happy memories of Christmas, he also alluded to less than happy memories of an interaction with his aunt, Princess Margaret, who once gave him a pen wrapped in a tiny rubber fish.
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Remembering said fish wrapped pen, Harry recalled that he thought the gift was “cold blooded”.
Despite the strange nature of the Christmas gift, Harry would later ruminate that he believes he and Margaret may have gotten on better but that he only realised this as her health declined.
He said: “Now and then, as I grew older, it struck me that Aunt Margo and I should’ve been friends. We had so much in common. Two Spares. Her relationship with Granny wasn’t an exact dialogue of mine with Willy, but pretty close.
“The simmering rivalry, the intense competition…it all looked familiar. Aunt Margo also wasn’t that dissimilar from Mummy. Both rebels, both labelled as sirens. So, my first thought when I learned in early 2002 that she’d been taken ill was to wish there’d been more time to get to know her.”