Prince George’s birthday tradition that Diana started – but Prince William struggles with

Julia Samuel, one of Princess Diana’s closest friends, is a godmother to Prince George – and she previously shared a revealing insight into a sweet birthday tradition
Like all families with young children, Prince William and Kate pull out all the stops to make sure birthdays in their household are extra special.

Proud mum Kate has previously shared some of their birthday traditions – including the fact that she stays up until midnight making birthday cakes for Prince George , Princess Charlotte and little Prince Louis. But there is one aspect of the celebrations that dad Prince William really struggles with.
One of Prince George’s godparents is Julia Samuel, a good friend of the late Princess Diana, and she previously revealed the noisy tradition she has passed on to the Wales family.
“I do to George what [Diana] did to us, which is give impossible toys that are really noisy and take a lot of making,” she admitted. “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 added that the rest of the family takes great pleasure in watching William squirm – especially “cheeky” George. She explained that it “makes [her] laugh, and it makes George laugh.”

Julia talked about the funny tradition when she was a guest on the podcast How to Fail with Elizabeth Day, in an episode in 2020 to mark what would have been Diana’s 59th birthday. Sadly, Diana never got to meet her grandchildren. She died following a car crash in Paris in August 1997 at the age of just 36.
Asked about her royal godson George, Julia said he was “amazing” – adding her dear friend Diana would have adored him too. “He’s funny and feisty and cheeky and God she [Diana] would have loved him so much,” she said. “That is heartbreaking for all of them.”

William has spoken in the past about the importance of keeping his mother’s memory alive by making sure his children know all about their late grandmother.

During an appearance in the 2017 ITV documentary ‘Diana, Our Mother: Her Life and Legacy’, William “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.”

William later joked, “She’d be a nightmare grandmother, absolute nightmare! She’d love the children to bits, but… She’d come in probably at bath time, cause an amazing amount of scene, bubbles everywhere, bathwater all over the place ‒ and then leave.”

He added: “I want to make as much time and effort with Charlotte and George as I can because I realise that these early years particularly are crucial for children, and having seen what she did for us.”