The Royal Family are known for the weird and wonderful Christmas presents they gift each other over the holiday, and the real reason they prefer these joke presents to ‘lavish’ gifts is surprisingly relatable.
Buying thoughtful Christmas gifts for every single friend and family member over the holiday period presents a number of challenges - especially when you want to keep to a tight budget so you can splurge on yourself with pieces from the Reiss post-Christmas sale where we've found some of Kate Middleton's favourites and other Quiet Luxury staples with huge discounts.
While you may think that the Royal Family don't have this same problem, being one of the richest families in the world, you'd be wrong. Well, not wrong. But not entirely right.
For the royals, buying the perfect gift poses a problem because of the plain fact that every family member, from King Charles to Prince Louis, likely already has everything they could want. So what do they do?
The answer is very simple. They focus on ‘winding each other up’ instead of trying to impress through thoughtful and meaningful gifts.
That's according to HELLO!'s royal editor Emily Nash. Speaking on the publication's A Right Royal Podcast, Nash shared that the royals tend to avoid presenting each other with big lavish presents and instead buy items they know will embarrass the recipient and get a laugh out of the rest of The Firm.
"The royal family have little piles of presents for each person laid out on trestle tables in Sandringham," she shared. "Typically they buy things that are cheap and make people laugh; it's not about big lavish presents, it's about winding someone up in many cases."
Case in point? In their book Finding Freedom, authors Omid Scobie and Carolyn Durand claimed that Prince Harry once bought his grandmother, the late Queen Elizabeth, a shower cap with the phrase 'Ain't life a [explicit]' printed on its front, which the authors say 'she loved.' They also write, "Another time he gifted his grandmother a Big Mouth Billy Bass singing toy that was said to sit proudly in Balmoral, her Scottish retreat, and provide the Queen with great laughs."
A running theme throughout the joke presents the royals give to one another seems to be one of items boasting replicas of the Queen's own face.
Prince William once reportedly gifted her a pair of slippers with her face on them and Meghan Markle even once gave Harry a Christmas tree ornament that was a tiny model of his grandmother - we love to imagine this on their tree!
But not all of their gifts are gag presents. Recalling her first Christmas with the Royal Family, Kate Middleton shared how nervous she was to join in with the celebrations and how hard she worked to find the perfect gift for the woman who literally has everything - Queen Elizabeth.
"I can remember being at Sandringham, for the first time, at Christmas, and I was worried what to give the Queen as her Christmas gift," she told the documentary film Our Queen at 90.
"I was thinking, ‘Gosh, what should I give her?’ I thought back to what would I give my own grandparents, and I thought, ‘I’ll make her something.’ Which could have gone horribly wrong, but I decided to make my granny’s recipe of chutney."
The gift went down a storm. Next to a shower cap and slippers, how could it not?
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