Twenty-twenty-four has proved something of an annus horribilis for the Windsors, with both King Charles III and the Princess of Wales battling serious health problems – but the general mood among the royal family appears to be one of optimism when looking ahead to 2025. It’s fitting, then, that the King and Queen are due to host a larger celebratory gathering at Sandringham this Christmas than ever before, with approximately 40 members of the clan heading to Norfolk from Christmas Eve onwards. It’s likely that the Prince and Princess of Wales will make an appearance with Prince George, Princess Charlotte, and Prince Louis – although it’s conceivable that they will spend a quieter holiday at nearby Anmer Hall just the five of them, only joining the rest of the Windsors at St Mary Magdalene Church on Christmas morning. The public is guaranteed more than a glimpse of Kate, though, thanks to her carol service, Together at Christmas, pre-recorded at Westminster Abbey in early December and due to air on ITV at 7:30pm GMT on Christmas eve. As for the Duke and Duchess of Sussex? It’s believed the couple will once again be celebrating at home in Montecito, California, with Prince Archie and Princess Lilibet.
Here, a breakdown of the royal family’s Christmas traditions through the centuries, and how they plan to mark the 25th in 2024.
The Trees
Famously, it’s an engraving depicting Queen Victoria and Prince Albert standing beside a Christmas tree at Windsor and published in the Illustrated London News in 1848 that inspired the wider British public to decorate evergreens each December, with Albert donating trees to schools and barracks near Windsor in lieu of the then-popular branch of mistletoe or ivory. In accordance with German tradition, the royal family would only bring their tree inside on Christmas Eve, decorating it with real candles, baubles and homemade gingerbread, before opening presents.
Today, a 20-foot Norwegian spruce from Windsor Great Park is displayed in St George’s Hall at Windsor Castle each year. Meanwhile, at Buckingham Palace, a trio of Christmas trees is placed in the Marble Hall and decorated by staffers in early December, with the King and Queen putting the finishing touches on their tree at Sandringham with the help of their loved ones on 24 December. (As the late Queen Elizabeth II said in her 2015 Christmas speech: “One of the joys of living a long life is watching one’s children, then grandchildren, then great-grandchildren, help decorate the Christmas tree.”) That’s before mentioning the tree that Camilla has installed in Clarence House each year, with children from Helen & Douglas House invited to help the Queen decorate it.
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The Cards
Among the Windsors’ other festive traditions come December: sending out Christmas cards featuring a family photograph to around 1,000 people, a ritual the Cambridges and Sussexes have both adopted. In 2024, the King and Queen released one featuring a relaxed picture of themselves taken by Millie Pilkington among the rhododendrons of the Buckingham Palace gardens. The Duke and Duchess of Sussex, meanwhile, incorporated six images from the last 12 months into their card – offering a glimpse of their family life in California with Prince Archie and Princess Lilibet. Again, it was Victoria who first popularised sending festive cards in 1843, the same year as the publication of Charles Dickens’s A Christmas Carol, when the so-called “penny” post made sending letters more affordable.
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The Location
While in recent decades the Windsors have spent Christmas at Sandringham in Norfolk, the royals have a long history of celebrating Christmas at Windsor Castle. During the war, the late Queen spent the holiday there with her family, famously staging pantomimes each year in an attempt to keep morale high.
In The Windsor Diaries, the Queen’s girlhood confidante Alathea Fitzalan Howard recalls hand-painting Christmas cards, giving festive “thés dansant”, and rehearsing theatricals with the young Princesses Elizabeth and Margaret, noting savagely in an entry from 1942: “Sleeping Beauty could be made so charming with a completely fairytale atmosphere but how can PE [Princess Elizabeth] with her sense of her non-exalted position bear to act in a rowdy variety show?”
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Interestingly, Queen Mary, Elizabeth’s grandmother, first noticed the romantic connection between Elizabeth and the future Duke of Edinburgh after the Princess’s performance in a pantomime based on Aladdin, and Elizabeth frequently returned to Windsor with her children on 25 December after marrying Philip and starting a family. She only changed her preferred Christmas location to Sandringham in the late ’80s, when Windsor had to undergo rewiring – with Charles and Camilla choosing to return to Norfolk each December throughout their reign thus far.
In the more distant past, Queen Victoria and Prince Albert spent every festive period at Windsor throughout their 20-year marriage. Among their favourite winter activities? Skating on the pond at Frogmore House and riding horse-drawn sleighs around the property. According to the Royal Collection Trust, “Queen Victoria took instruction in skating from a tutor from Eton, but she preferred to be pushed in a sleigh adapted for the ice by Prince Albert.”
The Menu
This is only the third year in which Charles and Camilla have presided over the family gathering at Sandringham, so it remains to be seen whether they will change up the Windsors’ Christmas routine – but it seems doubtful (although I’m sure all of the vegetables are now organic and the meat from heritage breeds). This year, the King and Queen will host the usual lunch for the wider royal family at Buckingham Palace before leaving for Sandringham, where they will be joined by their chosen guests in the run up to Christmas Eve. Traditionally, on the 24th, the family has a black-tie cocktail reception and formal dinner, with a classic festive meal served on Christmas Day. According to Darren McGrady, a royal chef during the late Queen’s reign, said meal usually consisted of “homemade sage and onion stuffing, Brussels sprouts with bacon and chestnuts, sometimes parsnips and carrots – it varied year to year – mashed potatoes and roast potatoes, homemade gravy, then Christmas pudding with brandy sauce… Later in the day there would be afternoon tea, and that always included a chocolate Yule log, a Christmas cake made by the chefs in the kitchen and a selection of chocolatey pastries.”
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Tom Parker Bowles, who will be joining the King and Queen at Sandringham for the first time this year, confirmed while speaking to The Telegraph that it will be very much business-as-usual, food-wise. “I know there’s turkey and sprouts and church,” he quipped. “And I have to bring a suit and a dinner jacket.” For those intrigued by royal Christmas menus past, Parker Bowles’s Cooking and the Crown, published this year, dives into the history of royal tastes. In the Edwardian age, he reports, there was “always a boar’s head jelly, stuffed with forcemeat, thin strips of tongue and cheek, bacon, truffles and pistachios”, along with a “huge raised pie, in which woodcock went into pheasant, pheasant into chicken, and chicken into turkey”. The occasional roasted cygnet made an appearance, too: in 1908, “Their Majesties” feasted on birds “reared on the Thames, and caught by Mr Abnett, the King’s swan master”, according to The Times. Considerably more tempting to modern palettes: the Pulled and Grilled Turkey that the royal family eats on boxing day, whose recipe Parker Bowles recounts in full. A “particular favourite of the King’s”, it includes leftover turkey coated with worcestershire sauce-, tabasco-, and mango chutney-infused breadcrumbs.
