25 December 2023 , 09:30
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Attending the annual family Christmas celebrations as a member of the Royal Family is reported to be a little less relaxed than the festive seasons the rest of us enjoy with our families. This is partly down to the strict hierarchy in place inside the family institution, at which King Charles sits firmly at the head as monarch.
You might think that the rules are relaxed a little at Christmastime as the House of Windsor gets into the Christmas spirit, but it's said that there is one rule in particular that is enforced even during the festive season, no matter how much some of the royals may struggle with it.
The one thing the rest of the royals who visit Sandringham to spend Christmas with the King have to follow is that none of them can go to bed before him. This was reportedly also true during the reign of the late Queen Elizabeth - and one royal found it "agony" to stay up so late an insider revealed.
Sir William Heseltine, who was a private secretary to Queen Elizabeth between 1986 and 1990, is reported to have said during an interview that, "For Diana the long royal evenings were agony. There'd be an hour or so in the sitting room of everyone sitting around making conversation, and nobody felt it right to go to bed before the Queen did. "And Diana was driven to such extremes that she'd excuse herself and go to bed, which was thought to be rather bad form, going to bed before the Queen".
King Charles is understood to be a bit of a night owl himself, with his youngest son Prince Harry saying in a documentary to mark Charles's 70th that, "this is a man who has dinner ridiculously late at night, and then goes to his desk later that night and will fall asleep on his notes to the point where he'll wake up with a piece of paper stuck to his face [...] the man never stops".
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Despite the fact Charles is likely not to be working as hard as usual over Christmas itself, he still has his duties as monarch to attend to - and the family always has to put a public face on when they make their annual appearance at St. Mary Magdalene Church in Sandringham, where they attend the Christmas Day service.
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