Instead of tinsel and carols, she gets plastic tubing and the steady beep of medical equipment.
Nurses, doctors and the sterile surroundings of a hospital are hardly conducive to the colourful Christmas morning a child fantasizes about.
For Diamond Marshall, none of that matters.
For the six-year-old cancer patient and her family, their Christmas dream has already come true.
"Call it a Christmas miracle — it is a miracle," said Lyall Marshall, Diamond's father.
The news, for a girl battling a rare type of adrenal cancer, couldn't be better.
"It's the one we've been waiting for a long time," said Lyall.
"We believe that Diamond is cancer-free as of yesterday."
The stunning news comes after Diamond underwent surgery this week to remove numerous tumours, and biopsies showed all to be cancer free.
It caps an emotional year for the young girl, who made international headlines this past July when she was chosen to hand flowers to the Duchess of Cambridge at Calgary International Airport.
As Duchess Kate bent down to greet her, Diamond couldn't contain her joy, flinging her arms around the future queen of England, the impromptu hug captured by the world's press.
"She told me she liked the flowers a lot," Diamond told QMI Agency after the Royal encounter, which included chatting with Prince William.
The brief meeting, made possible after Diamond wrote a letter asking to greet Kate, left the princess-loving girl on Cloud 9.
Apparently the tiny flower girl left a big impression on the Royal Couple too.
A call from QMI Agency conveying the amazing news to St. James's Palace in London, England, brought an unexpected and near-instant reply from Will and Kate.
"I passed the news to Their Royal Highnesses, who asked me to convey how pleased they are to hear the news and their best wishes to Diamond and her family at this happy time," wrote a palace spokesman, officially speaking on the duke and duchess' behalf.
"They hope for a joyful 2012 for Diamond and her family."
A cancer-free future would certainly be a joy for Diamond, who lost her mom, Memory Marshall, to the disease four years ago, when Memory was just 32.
But first, with the support of her dad and step-mom Danielle, Diamond faces a bone-marrow transplant and gruelling high-dose chemotherapy sessions early in the new year.
"Cancer is a tricky thing and we're celebrating right now, but she's still got a long road to recovery for this surgery and then she has a transplant in January," said Lyall.
"The big one is that bone-marrow transplant."
Having found no visible evidence of cancer, doctors still want to ensure there is no disease hiding in the body — thus the need for chemo to flush her entire system.
Keeping the disease in remission is going to be a tough slog for the little girl, though Diamond does have something special to look forward to when the hospital visits are over.
Her dad says Dreams Take Flight has stepped forward to ensure Diamond's dream of meeting Sleeping Beauty's Princess Aurora in Disneyland comes true.
"They let her know she could meeting Princess Aurora, the princess she really wants to meet," said Lyall.
"That really put a smile on her face."
It'll be tougher to smile on Christmas Day, laying in a hospital bed, but Lyall says the family plans to make the best of it.
"Our motto is Christmas comes on time once a year, and as long as we're all together it doesn't matter where we are -- at home or in the hospital, or even Hawaii," said Lyall.
"It's alright by us, we're going to have a hoot no matter what."
Source: Toronot Sun