How adorable is Harry and Meghan’s ‘Happy Holidays’ greeting card?
The devoted parents’ arms are extended towards their cheerful children Archie, five, and Lilibet, three, while their three dogs frolic around them.
In fact, it was a rare sighting of the Sussex family. Still, because of their privacy concerns, we don’t see their children’s faces.
The card, which offers its recipients “a very happy holiday and a happy new year” from the couple’s private office, the Archewell Foundation and Archewell Productions, reveals only the backs of Archie and Lilibet’s heads. But how cute that they both seem to have inherited their father’s striking red hair.
Let’s hope the personal Christmas cards they send to the children’s grandfather, King Charles (who has privately revealed that he is looking forward to meeting them) really show their faces.
This intimate image only reminds us of the terrible gulf that now exists between the Sussexes and the Royal Family, who will celebrate Christmas oceans away. It does not hide the fact that 2024 has been the annus horribilis of the Sussexes: the year in which the world made Meghan tremble.
The Duchess of Sussex, once America’s favorite, has been branded “difficult to work with” in recent months, while her and Harry’s latest film offering, a documentary about the elite sport of polo , has been labeled a “failure”, “tedious”. , “mostly boring” and “noisy and niche.”
Her bosses at Netflix, with whom she and Harry have a $100 million contract depending on their production, are said to have been “exhausted” by working with Meghan.
This family photo appears on the Sussexes’ ‘Happy Holidays’ card
Prince Harry and Meghan have been striving for success since they moved to the US.
However, the bad news doesn’t end there. Even the American magazine The Cut, a bible of the liberal left and a former fawning supporter of Meghan, has turned against her. Last week he published an article about the Sussexes under the title ‘Harry and Meghan’s projects can’t stop failing’.
The article continued in a similar vein: ‘Prince Harry and Meghan Markle’s devious attempts to launch a successful state effort continued this week with a new five-part polo documentary series on Netflix.’
And then, just when Megs perhaps thought her media profile couldn’t get any worse, a Mail on Sunday investigation revealed that luxury handbag brand Cesta Collective, which she announced this summer she was investing in (and which sells bags for more of £700 each), pays Impoverished Rwandan women receive just 82 pence for an eight-hour day to produce them. This, despite Cesta boasting about its “fair compensation practices” and the Duchess saying, “With Cesta, I really began to understand how many women’s lives were impacted and improved through their work.”
Meghan has no role in running the company and Cesta says many of the women would be paid more depending on how fast they knit.
What’s clear, however, is that now that Harry and Meghan have squeezed every last financial morsel out of their vengeful feud with the Royal Family, Megs is left to fend for herself on her own stiletto-clad feet—and it’s not proving easy. .
Failing to take advantage of her royal connections, the American media ridicules her.
Insiders say it now all depends on the launch of his Netflix cooking show early next year thanks to his lifestyle brand American Riviera Orchard. They call it the “last chance” for her to “save” the couple’s lucrative deal with Netflix, which is their main source of funding.
Which raises questions in itself. Is Meghan going alone? And what prestige did she have other than being a supporting TV actress on a cable series who married a prince?
Especially when it was questions about the state of his marriage that made the only headlines for Harry at a recent event held by the left-leaning New York Times, ostensibly about his mission for truth and media accountability.
What’s so surprising is that as Meghan’s star declined, the opposite happened in the United States for the Princess of Wales after her traumatic year of battling cancer. A year in which he made that remarkably raw personal video saying he needed time for treatment and healing and to be with his young family.
His honesty in sharing details about his health with the world (and, more importantly, with other cancer sufferers) earned him a place on the prestigious American magazine Time magazine’s Person of the Year short list.
Time cited Kate, who was recently in London for her fourth ‘Together At Christmas’ carol service, as having “sparked a conversation about privacy and health among public figures.” In the end, the Person of the Year award went to Donald Trump.
But there is a bittersweet joy in the fact that Kate has been shortlisted after her own ‘annus horribilis’. It is an extraordinary achievement: he achieved it when he was out of public view for most of a year, after undergoing serious abdominal surgery and then chemotherapy.
None of which will have gone unnoticed by Meghan and Harry in their fight for success.
Ironically, I think it was the King and Kate’s ordeals with cancer that firmly put an end to Harry and Meghan making money through their spiteful rants against them.
How could Megs keep coining it by being so horrible to King Charles and the future Queen Catherine, as she did in the past, when they were so sick? And when people around the world admired the way both the King and Princess not only publicly revealed their diagnoses but carried on as best they could with their duties despite their illnesses.
However, without income from projects like that Oprah interview, their tell-all Netflix docuseries, and Harry Spare’s book, the couple has been left woefully exposed.
How lonely and, yes, anxious they must feel spending Christmas in their elegant Montecito mansion. She with her mother Doria but with her father, exiled from her life and yet living just a few miles away, and Harry, a world apart from her own family. Even the foolish Prince must now wonder if it was all worth it.