Princess Diana’s Hilarious Birthday Tradition Lives on, Friend Said After Doing for Prince George What She ‘Did to Us’
She may be gone but Princess Diana’s legacy lives on. Among the many ways, from her style to her philanthropic efforts, are birthday gifts. A friend of Diana’s carries on her birthday tradition, giving Prince George, and the rest of the late royal’s grandchildren, certain toys.
Diana’s grandchildren receive ‘impossible’ toys as birthday gifts
George, Prince William and Kate Middleton’s oldest child, turned 10 on July 22. And he got presents Diana would’ve certainly approved of, according to her friend’s 2020 remark about birthdays.
Speaking on the How To Fail With Elizabeth Day podcast, Julia Samuel, a close friend of Diana’s who is also their son Prince George’s godmother, revealed she still upholds a tradition of the royal’s. She buys them “impossible” toys dads Prince Harry and the Prince of Wales have to painstakingly assemble.
“I do to George what [Diana] did to us, which is give impossible toys that are really noisy and take a lot of making,” Samuel said. “William then has to spend days putting [them] together. And then put all the machinery together, and it makes awful tooting noises and lights flashing and all of that.”
Samuel appeared in an episode marking what would’ve been Diana’s 59th birthday. On the podcast, she described George, who turned 10 on July 22, as “amazing.”
“He’s funny and feisty and cheeky, and God she [Diana] would have loved him so much,” Samuel said. “That is heartbreaking for all of them.”
Kate Middleton has another birthday ‘tradition’ with her and Prince William’s kids
Beyond Diana’s birthday tradition is one from William’s wife. Kate revealed in the 2019 TV special, A Berry Royal Christmas, that she takes it upon herself to make dessert for birthdays in the Wales household.
“I love making the cake,” Kate said (via People). “It’s become a bit of a tradition that I stay up ’til midnight with ridiculous amounts of cake mix and icing, and I make far too much. But I love it.”
Kate even asked for baking tips from Alice Fevronia, a finalist on The Great British Baking Show, who joined the royal couple to celebrate the anniversary of the National Health Service.
“The princess was actually asking a lot of baking tips like, ‘How did you get the buttercream so smooth?'” Fevronia said at the time. “She mentioned that she’d been up quite late on a couple of occasions trying to decorate the kids’ birthday cakes.”
Kate asked “about how to get the sides of the cake straight and smooth,” Fevronia continued. “I used to be a teacher, so I went into teacher mode. I was like, ‘Right, this is what you need to do,’” before adding it had been “quite cool” to give Kate “some tips!”
William once said Princess Diana would be a ‘nightmare grandmother’ with Prince George, Princess Charlotte, and Prince Louis
Calling Diana “the best mum in the world” in Diana, Our Mother: Her Life and Legacy, William admitted it’d be different had she lived to become a grandmother.
“She’d be a nightmare grandmother,” William said in the 2017 HBO documentary. “She’d love the children to bits, but she’d be an absolute nightmare.”
At the time, William and Kate were parents to George and a now-8-year-old Princess Charlotte. Prince Louis, 5, wouldn’t join their family until April 2018. As for why Diana would be an “absolute nightmare” of a grandma, William explained his late mother would probably make a mess of bath time.
“She’d come in, probably at bath time, cause an amazing amount of scene — bubbles everywhere, bathwater all over the place, and then leave,” William said.
