As Prince Louis approaches his eighth birthday, the royal family are preparing to mark the momentous occasion with their traditional festivities.
Princess Catherine has previously disclosed several birthday customs the family observe, most notably that she regularly stays up until midnight baking birthday cakes for her children’s special days.
Yet there is one playful tradition, initiated by Princess Diana, which Prince William finds particularly testing each year.
The practice began when Princess Diana would present the children of her close friend Julia Samuel with noisy, difficult-to-assemble gifts — simultaneously thrilling the youngsters while driving their parents to distraction.
Julia, who serves as one of Prince George’s seven godparents, has carried on this tradition with the Wales family, leaving Prince William to tackle the maddening task year after year, reports the Liverpool Echo.
Samuel first spoke about the entertaining custom during her appearance on the podcast How to Fail with Elizabeth Day in a 2020 episode marking what would have been Diana’s 59th birthday, explaining: “I do to George what [Diana] did to us, which is give impossible toys that are really noisy and take a lot of making.
“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.”
She explained the rest of the family gets great entertainment from watching William struggle with building the gifts, especially “cheeky” George. She mentioned it “makes [her] laugh, and it makes George laugh.”
When speaking about her royal godson George, Julia characterised him as “amazing”, indicating her dear friend Diana would have adored him immensely.
“He’s funny and feisty and cheeky and God she [Diana] would have loved him so much,” she said. “That is heart-breaking for all of them.”
Princess Diana tragically never met her grandchildren, as she was merely 36 when she perished in a Paris car crash in 1997. Prince William was 15 at the time of his mother’s death, while Prince Harry was only 12.
Despite Prince George, Princess Charlotte and Prince Louis never knowing their grandmother personally, Prince William has repeatedly emphasised maintaining her memory for his three children by ensuring they comprehend the particulars of Diana’s life.
Speaking during the 2017 ITV documentary Diana, Our Mother: Her Life and Legacy, William said: “So we’ve got more photos up round the house now of her and we talk about her a bit and stuff. And it’s hard because obviously Catherine didn’t know her, so she cannot really provide that level of detail.
“So I do, regularly, putting George or Charlotte to bed, talk about her and just try and remind them that there are two grandmothers, there were two grandmothers in their lives. And so it’s important that they know who she was and that she existed.”
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‘ Some details of this article were extracted from the following source www.express.co.uk ’
