WE probably have Dickens to thank for the image of Christmas as the ultimate family get together. Before Bob Cratchit and Tiny Tim it was simply a religious holiday, a trip to church, a bit jollier than most perhaps because of its purloining of pagan Winter Solstice celebrations. But now the Christmas of Victorian family values - angels, shopping days and baby Jesus notwithstanding - is the desired myth. If Christmas means anything at all in these secular times it means family and children, and all the emotional blackmail that entails because Christmas memories, good or bad, forge their own family myths.
Christmas is part of what being a parent - particularly a mother - is all about. It measures the passing of the years like nothing else. The thrill of that first Christmas and the little eyes starring in wonderment at a tree with lights on in the house. The excitement of the four year old who makes herself sick with excitement. The nativity play, with tinsel halos, wandering eyes and folded hands. The carols. We will rock you rock you rock you, they sing, and the tears just well up and grown up voices crack. Even if yours aren't there. Especially if yours aren't there. And, of course, the six o'clock awakening that needs no alarm call. "Look what Father Christmas brought me Mummy."
Each Christmas brings back memories of previous ones and, for parents on their own it's a time of unimaginable pain and loss. Many separated or divorced families have no option. But the last minute decision not to go to Sandringham was Diana's own. Unlike Prince Andrew and Fergie, who have worked out an amicable modus vivendi spending weekends and holidays as a family, Charles and Diana's division of their children allows no blurring of the edges.
He has one school exeat, she the next. July is spent with her, August with him. For the first two weeks of the Christmas holiday the little princes are at home with Mum in Kensington Palace, the next two with Dad in Switzerland. It has been like that for years, his and hers buffered by Christmas itself spent with Granny and Grandpa and the corgis at Sandringham. Until this year that is.
So what went wrong? 1995 seems to have been the Christmas of the absentee mother. On New Year's Eve we had the doubtful pleasure of hearing Paula Yates announce her pregnancy by Michael Hutchence. "We dreamt of having a baby together, now the dream is a reality. We could not be happier," gushed Paula. This dream had already been revealed to readers of Hello magazine before the announcement. "I've always wanted to have a baby for the man I love. It certainly isn't to cement the relationship, because I don't think it does that. It's out of a healthy desire to have someone very small living with us that laughs and has rosy cheeks and can't get away when you try to kiss it."
Healthy? For whom? Not the three little girls left behind in London while Mum was announcing her devastating news to the world from Australia. Weren't they worth kissing? Had she even warned them? Unlikely, as estranged husband Bob Geldof didn't even know - and he was back in England looking after them. At 12, Fifi Trixie Bell is certainly old enough to take it in. And isn't puberty difficult enough anyway without having to cope with your mother's ageing rock chick sexuality, breast implants, babies and all? Peaches (6) and Pixie (5) may not yet understand the long term implications, but Christmas without their Mummy is something that they will have understood only too well.
Then we have Ulrika Jonsson, the one time TV AM weather girl turned gladiator hostess who for some reason has achieved super babe status among otherwise rationally minded males. Like Paula, Ulrika came from a broken home and was shunted from mother to father through her childhood and teens. Not surprisingly perhaps, she married young - at 23 looking for stability. Family life, she announced at the time, was incredibly important to her. She and her husband, cameraman John Turnbull, would have lots of children.
Then fame intervened. She left. She came back. She got pregnant. A son, Cameron, was born in 1994. She left again. Cameron, Ulrika assures us, is the most important thing in her life. Yet in an interview in this month's FHM, a middle shelf man's magazine, her only reference to him is the hope that no one will think she's a bad mother. So was this good mother at her baby son's side to experience his wonder and help him unwrap his Christmas presents? No. According to the Daily Mirror she was 200 miles away enjoying a well earned break from Gladiators with her Gladiator lover Hunter, and his family at a Yorkshire hotel.
So, what of Diana? Like Paula and Ulrika she too came from a broken home but unlike them there seems to have been little joy, selfish or otherwise, in her Christmas. Lunch alone at Kensington Palace with no one there to notice when she dozed off that the aromatherapy candles had set off the fire alarm and summoned the fire brigade. Boxing Day was enlivened by a trip to her therapist, Susie Orbach. Then on December 27th the unscheduled limbo ended, it was back to Plan A and a week's solitude in the sun. No friends, let alone lovers - just a paid companion, her press secretary's PA Victoria Mendem.
Because what happened this year was the queen bowled her a googlie. For some time now, Diana has called all the shots. As for the Windsor family Christmas, she'd handled it before, she'd handle it again. Then came The Letter.
Divorce by Royal Command. Ultimately she has no choice. But nonetheless, it needs her consent, her signed consent, and in the terms of that consent lies her future and that of her sons. The timing was masterly. Within a few days of its receipt she would be at Sandringham, before she'd had time to take either legal advice from her lawyer, Lord Miscon, or strategic advice from her therapist.
There was too much at stake to risk being cornered on enemy territory. So she had no real option but retreat.
For children of separated parents, whoever they are, the longed for Christmas present is that mummy and daddy stay together, no matter what. But children don't always know best. For 10 years that's exactly what the Waleses did and it brought nothing but pain. As Diana stood on the beach at Barbuda earlier this week watching the new year push out the old, it is to be hoped that she realised that the alternative, an honest to goodness uncontested was probably the best Christmas present she could give her boys, and in doing so show her version of motherhood is different to those of Ulrika and Paula.