Watch Queen Elizabeth’s Charming First Televised Christmas Message
The royal family is getting into the holiday spirit!
In a heart-warming post on their official Instagram page, Queen Elizabeth can be seen making her first ever televised Christmas message in 1957.
“I very much hope that this new medium will make my Christmas message more personal and direct,” the Queen says as she looks into the camera smiling, occasionally checking her notes on the desk in front of her.
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Filmed at Sandringham in 1957, she continues: “It’s inevitable that I should seem a rather remote figure to many of you – a successor to the Kings and Queens of history. Someone whose face may be familiar in newspapers and films but who never really touches your personal lives. But now at least for a few minutes I welcome you to the peace of my own home.”
A post shared by The Royal Family (@theroyalfamily) on Dec 8, 2019 at 9:10am PST
Watching the Queen’s speech on Christmas Day is a holiday tradition shared in many homes around the world and one that has stood the test of time. In 2012, the Queen recorded her message in 3D for the first time, exactly 80 years after her grandfather King George V broadcast his first speech on the radio, beginning the royal tradition.
The monarch gave her first ever Christmas speech five years prior at age 26, just months after the death of her father and before her coronation. The video, which shows the 31-year-old monarch wearing a metallic evening dress and a pearl necklace, was filmed at the Long Library at Sandringham. Portraits of her young children Prince Charles and Princess Anne can be seen in the background.
After talking about the advances in technology and how important it is “to take advantage of the new life without losing the best of the old,” the monarch goes on to discuss the royal tours she and Prince Philip undertook that year and the huge welcome they received, ending with: “I hope that 1958 may bring you God’s blessing and all the things you long for. And so I wish you all, young and old, wherever you may be, all the fun and enjoyment and the peace of a very happy Christmas.”
