History Main / DreamingOfAWhiteChristmas

* ''ComicStrip/CalvinAndHobbes''. Every single strip set in the winter has feet of snow, enough to make giant snow beasts. Calvin apparently lives in Northern Canada. (Or Ohio in the '60s, '70s, and early '80s, as Bill Watterson did. Yes, there really was that much snow. Even now, the northern part of the state in particular gets quite a lot of snow due to the influence of Lake Erie.)

* Films and stories about the life of UsefulNotes/{{Jesus}} usually feature warm if not desert-like weather. However, Christmas nativity scenes sometimes (thought not frequently) portray Jesus' birth as having taken place during snow. Snow in Bethlehem is only slightly more likely than it is in Jerusalem, where it is exceedingly rare (just over 30 days of snow, cumulatively, in the last 60 years), and has never been recorded to occur before January. The Roman Empire saw global temperatures several degrees ''higher'' than they are today. However, it's quite likely to have been raining. And this is assuming that Jesus was actually born in December... many historians are convinced that the Roman Catholic Church placed Christmas in the early winter to coincide with the Winter Solstice in order to attract pagans and that he was more likely born in March or April.

** Coastal North Carolina is worse-- we're lucky enough for it to snow even once a winter, let alone accumulate. Even then, the snow comes in late January or in February, which are normally colder months than December. Though it did snow on the night of Christmas Day in 2010, and wound up dumping ''15 inches of snow'' the next day. What's worse, the coast is absolutely '''frigid''' during the winter, with lows frequently dipping down into the 20s and teens. It just doesn't snow, ever.

Christmas time, in particular, is always a [[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Currier_and_Ives Currier and Ives]] picture-print type of affair (something that gets lampshaded in the song "Sleigh Ride" with the lyrics "It'll nearly be like a picture print by Currier and Ives"). In fact, those prints played a big part in helping to originate cultural expectations of snow at Christmas, as they were first produced in the 19th century, during the tail end of the three-century-long climatic cold snap known as the [[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Little_Ice_Age Little Ice Age]] -- a period which saw increased winter snowfall in both Europe and North America.

Christmas time, in particular, is always a [[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Currier_and_Ives Currier and Ives]] picture-print type of affair (something that gets lampshaded in the song "Sleigh Ride" with the lyrics "It'll nearly be like a picture print by Currier and Ives"). In fact, those prints played a big part in helping to originate cultural expectations of snow at Christmas, as they were first produced in the 19th century during the tail end of the three-century-long climatic cold snap known as the [[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Little_Ice_Age Little Ice Age]]--a period which saw increased winter snowfall in both Europe and North America.

This is most often seen in Hollywood depictions of [[HollywoodNewEngland New England]] or the Midwest, but will probably be the case in any setting if [[HollywoodProvincialism your writers are from southern California]], where there's a much warmer ecosystem and December typically brings pouring rain and flash floods. What little snow they do see is usually the dry, powdery kind from ski trips to Lake Tahoe, not realizing that snow elsewhere tends to be far more wet and heavy.

Christmas time, in particular, is always a [[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Currier_and_Ives Currier and Ives]] picture-print type of affair (something that gets lampshaded in the song "Sleigh Ride"). In fact, those prints played a big part in helping to originate cultural expectations of snow at Christmas, as they were first produced in the 19th century during the tail end of the three-century-long climatic cold snap known as the [[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Little_Ice_Age Little Ice Age]]--a period which saw increased winter snowfall in both Europe and North America.

In the [[UsefulNotes/AVeryBritishChristmas United Kingdom]], especially Southern England and Wales, there's seldom much if any snow at Christmas (although, given a recent spate of possibly-climate-change-related cold snaps, this might be changing in the future); interestingly, there seems to be some degree of regularity to when it ''does'' happen, however. Much of the popular imagery of an "old-fashioned" white Christmas goes back to Creator/CharlesDickens, who was really just being nostalgic for his own childhood white Christmases in the early 19th century... which just happened to fall during the latter part of the aforementioned Little Ice Age.[[note]]The first eight years of Dickens' life saw eight white Christmases in a row. Lucky bugger.[[/note]] Really, when you consider that pretty much all of Christmas as we now imagine it, and even Christmas being a popular holiday at all, was started by Dickens' ''Literature/AChristmasCarol'', our modern-day Christmas would essentially ''not exist'' [[ForWantOfANail had it not been abnormally cold during the author's childhood]].

* Played completely straight in [[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ktw4J8kg3SE a long-running Christmas ad]] for Miller High Life beer, depicting the proverbial one-horse open sleigh tooling around a picturesque, snowy countryside.

* Averted in the Midwest during the 2010s, in the Decembers of 2011, 2012, 2014, and 2015 (the latter two had theirs in November instead).

** Berlin actually wrote the song while lounging by a swimming pool in Phoenix. Similarly, Bob Wells came up with the lyrics for "The Christmas Song" (''Chestnuts roasting on an open fire, Jack Frost nipping at your nose'', etc.) while trying to "think cool" during a summer heat wave in Los Angeles.

* Subverted in the Creator/DrSeuss book ''Bartholomew and the Oobleck'', where everything gets covered in Oobleck.

* Considering that ''WesternAnimation/ThePolarExpress'' starts out in Grand Rapids (located in one of Michigan's infamous snowbelts) and leads to the North Pole, it makes sense that there would be plenty of snow on the ground.

* The official websites for Cbeebies and CBBC have a snowy theme around Christmas.

* Films and stories about the life of UsefulNotes/{{Jesus}} usually feature warm if not desert-like weather. However, Christmas nativity scenes sometimes (thought not frequently) portray Jesus' birth as having taken place during snow. Snow in Bethlehem is only slightly more likely than it is in Jerusalem, where it is exceedingly rare (just over 30 days of snow, cumulatively, in the last 60 years), and has never been recorded to occur before January. NThe Roman Empire saw global temperatures several degrees ''higher'' than they are today. However, it's quite likely to have been raining. And this is assuming that Jesus was actually born in December... many historians are convinced that the Roman Catholic Church placed Christmas in the early winter to coincide with the Winter Solstice in order to attract pagans and that he was more likely born in March or April.

This is most often seen in HollywoodNewEngland, but will probably be the case in any setting if [[HollywoodProvincialism your writers are from southern California]], where there's a much warmer ecosystem and December typically brings pouring rain and flash floods. What little snow they do see is usually the dry, powdery kind from ski trips to Lake Tahoe, not realizing that snow elsewhere tends to be far more wet and heavy.

* ''Series/{{Community}}'' was set in Colorado, but filmed in Los Angeles, meaning no snow for outdoor shots.... But they get around this in the holiday episode "Comparative Religion" by having the big climactic fight in the artificial snow of an outdoor 'winter wonderland' tableau.

In reality, white Christmases are likely to be seen only in specific regions when they're seen at all. In North America, this means Canada outside of the Pacific coast, and the [[UsefulNotes/ChristmasInAmerica United States]] in Alaska, the Northeast (especially New England and Upstate New York), the Upper Midwest, and the mountains. In Northern Europe, particularly Scandinavia and Russia, Christmases are almost ''always'' white, with permanent snow cover generally arriving in late November or early December and lasting until anywhere from March to May.