Festive gatherings at Sandringham have often been joyful and sometimes tense, as I’ve discovered while researching a special Christmas edition of my TV programme Reading the Royals.
Yet this year’s get-together will be like no other.
It comes after one of the most challenging years for the Windsors. Not only is King Charles still being treated for an undisclosed form of cancer, but his daughter-in-law Kate has undergone gruelling treatment for the same disease following major abdominal surgery last January.
And if that wasn’t enough suffering for a year, Queen Camilla contracted pneumonia after travelling to Australia and Samoa.
The King is determined to make this Christmas a big celebration for the extended Royal Family. Indeed, Prince William told families at a Christmas event for the 1st Battalion Mercian Regiment in Wiltshire this week that he was looking forward to spending it with 45 relatives ‘all in one room’!
Among those present for the first time will be the King’s stepson, Tom Parker Bowles, who revealed last weekend that he would be taking his two children to the royal retreat in Norfolk.
The food writer and Mail on Sunday columnist has never visited Sandringham. He usually spends Christmas with his ex-wife, the former fashion editor Sara Buys, and their teenage children, Lola and Frederick.
‘For the past 15 years, it has been: I go back to my ex-wife’s house, sit in my tracksuit bottoms, go to the pub while the beef’s in, then try to get my children to watch The Wild Geese. Classic. So this would be a bit different,’ he told the Daily Telegraph.
The King and Queen lead the royals at Sandringham Church on Christmas Day last year
For the first time, Tom Parker Bowles will be among those spending Christmas at Sandringham
As Tom will soon discover, there are no tracksuits at Sandringham. Men wear dinner suits while women can be expected to change outfits up to five times a day, according to Queen Elizabeth’s former dresser Angela Kelly.
‘I genuinely know nothing about it,’ he said. ‘I know there’s turkey and sprouts and church. And I have to bring a suit and a dinner jacket.’
The reason Tom is breaking his habit of 15 years is very poignant: Queen Camilla pleaded with him to join her and his stepfather.
‘My mum said, “I’d love you to come, I haven’t had Christmas with you for a long time”,’ he said. ‘It has been a hell of a two years for them. The older you get, the more conscious you become of mortality, especially with illnesses and the rest of it.’
He added of his mother’s infection: ‘She went back to work before she should have done, but she’s fine. She’s tough. She hates that she missed Remembrance Sunday. That’s a big day for her. She just gets on with it. She’s always been like that.
‘Nothing’s changed [since she became Queen] except she’s now Your Majesty, rather than Your Highness, and she works a lot harder.’
Despite the profound significance of this year’s celebrations, and the King and Queen’s intimations of mortality, there will be four conspicuous absences at the Christmas dinner table.
While the King’s stepson will be there – the first time a monarch’s stepchild has ever stayed at Sandringham – his younger son will not.
The Duke and Duchess of Sussex and their children, Prince Archie and Princess Lilibet, will instead be in California. Meghan’s mother, Doria Ragland, is likely to be the only member of either family to join them as they carve their turkey.
I am told that it is unlikely Prince Harry and his family were even invited to Sandringham this year.
‘Relations between Harry and his family are not sufficiently close for an invitation to be sent,’ a royal source tells me. ‘It’s very sad that things are that bad. We know that Harry wants to mend fences, but there is an awfully long way to go.’
