Prince Harry and Meghan Markle Excluded From Royal Family’s Christmas Plans: Report

Those who hoped that the British royal family’s difficult year might end with a happy reunion should prepare for disappointment. According to a new report, Prince Harry and Meghan Markle have not been invited to the Windsor family’s Christmas celebration again this year, following their exclusion this summer from Trooping the Colour, the annual pageant in celebration of the ruling monarch’s birthday.

According to an anonymous source who spoke with People, Harry and Meghan were intentionally left off the guest list at the royal family’s Christmas gathering at the Sandringham estate in Norfolk, a get-together that’s been a tradition for over a century. Harry’s brother, Prince William, his wife Kate Middleton, and children Prince George, Princess Charlotte, and Prince Louis are still expected to join King Charles III at the holiday celebration, as they have nearly every year they’ve been on the planet.

Prince Harry’s last appearance at the royal family’s holiday celebration was in 2018, just a few months after Markle and he wed. Less than six months later, Prince Archie, the couple’s first child, was born. By January 2020, Harry and Meghan announced that they were stepping down from their royal duties and moving to the US, a decision punctuated the following year with a bombshell interview with Oprah Winfrey, during which the couple detailed allegedly toxic treatment while living in the midst of the royal family.

Since their move to California, the couple have seen little of the royal family, with the 2022 funeral of Queen Elizabeth and a brief visit between Harry and his father, Charles following the latter’s cancer diagnosis this February. The meeting stoked hopes in some corners that the crisis would mend the separation within the family, or that Middleton’s announcement of her own cancer struggle the following month might bring the factions together.

Those wishes were dashed in June, when it became clear that Meghan and Harry would not be in attend Trooping the Colour—though that disappointment was tempered by Middleton’s appearance at the event amid her chemotherapy journey. According to a source who spoke with People, at this point Harry’s calls to his father “go unanswered. He has tried to reach out about the King’s health, but those calls go unanswered too.”

Neither the Duke and Duchess of Sussex nor the royal family have officially commented on the ongoing rift, which, while higher-profile and grander than most, is likely relatable to the slews of people who have parted ways with their families in recent years, a mental-health-forward trend known as family estrangement. But even before Meghan and Harry made their break with the family, Harry’s mother, Princess Diana, spoke openly about how much she disliked spending Christmas at Sandringham.

“It was highly fraught,” Diana told biographer Andrew Morton of the tradition, describing the holidays at the estate as “terrifying and so disappointing. No boisterous behaviour, lots of tension, silly behaviour, silly jokes that outsiders would find odd, but insiders understood. I sure was [an outsider].”