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Oh, the weather outside is frightful,
But the fire is so delightful.
And since we've no place to go,
Let It Snow! Let It Snow! Let It Snow!
—"Let It Snow! Let It Snow! Let It Snow!"
An easy way to isolate a place. A frequent manifestation is the snow day. Sometimes this is any snow at all, sometimes you'll at least require that the roads be blocked with it. Used in a wide variety of situations: Locked Room Mystery, Locked In A Room (especially—duh!— Locked In A Freezer), A House Divided, The Siege, Whack A Mole, And Then There Were None...
On a lighter note, if a couple (or potential couple) happen to get Snowed In together somewhere cozy, remember that Snow Means Love... (especially if There Is Only One Bed). Caught In The Rain is a subtrope of this. A still lighter note may produce a Snowball Fight.
Mild Truth In Television: in the more southern parts of both Europe and North America, a small amount of snow can bring a city to a halt, mostly out of confusion and rarity (school districts in Texas have been known to declare a snow day for less than inch of precipitation). Further north, and it takes actual serious buildup to have an effect.
Rarer variations include heavy rain or similarly extreme weather conditions.
Examples:
Anime and Manga
- Episode 7 of Kanokon used this plot. The snow was caused by a yuki-onna (snow woman) as part of a test on Kouta and Chizuru's relationship. Also, there were semi-sentient ninja snowmen.
Comics
- There's a Disney comic where Mickey and Goofy spend a weekend in a mountain cabin, and get snowed in. Goofy panics at first, while Mickey points out that he brought along plenty of food, books, and even cards. Eventually, Mickey is driven to the edge of panic by boredom and cabin fever, and Goofy calms him down... by starting a Snowball Fight. Eventually, the two dig a hole right through the snow on the other side of the door, and realize that it was only a few inches thick.
Film
- Snow Day, one of those Nickelodeon live-action movies, had this as its central premise, complete with evil snowplow man whose goal is to plow the streets and force kids to go to school.
- So the schools would just reopen at noon, once all the roads were clear? Ok...
- Home Alone 3 had the villains taking advantage of a snowstorm to isolate the street.
- The ending of Look Who's Talking Too.
- Preposterously overdone in The Day After Tomorrow.
Literature
Live Action TV
- This troper remembers an episode of Good Eats that started with "...Three inches of snow paralyzed Atlanta."
- It was supposed to be a "documentary" episode taking place just after Thanksgiving, and the three inches of snow ended up forcing the cast inside and sending most of the production crew into a "Good Eats starved" frenzy, from which they were appeased by Thanksgiving leftovers until Emeril came by in a V-22 Osprey. I'm not making that up.
- The X-Files Season 1 episode "Ice", in which they're snowed out up in the Arctic. And while they find time for a Ship Tease, seeing as how it's The X-Files, the writers find some way to make it creepy.
- Happens in Little House On The Prairie at least once.
Music
- The song "Let It Snow!", shown at the top of the page, has a surprising amount of sexual implication for a Christmas song. "The lights are turned way down low", for example.
Newspaper Comics
- Calvin And Hobbes and similar strips/series frequently have the character wish for a snow day:
- As Calvin once said, "Getting an inch of snow is like winning 10 cents in the lottery."
Webcomics
Western Animation
- An episode of Hey Arnold.
- Dexters Laboratory.
- The Simpsons did this on several occasions.
- Done in an episode of South Park. Cannibalism ensued.
- The Daria episode "Antisocial Climbers".
- In one episode of Jimmy Neutron, the titular character enhanced his friend's sunscreen to create a massive snowstorm in the middle of summer. The next morning, he wakes up, expecting it to have worn off... only to find that the snow level is so high, he can barely see out of his bedroom window on the second floor.
Truth In Television
- As an example of the contrast, this troper was born on the Canadian prairies and spent part of her childhood in the North. She didn't get a snow day until her third year of university - on the West Coast, where it snows an average of five inches a year.
- This Troper lives in Northern Sweden (so err.. Much farther north, although probably not as cold OR snowy) and has never gotten a snow day in his entire life. At one point those from the outlying villages got a day off because it was -40 degrees C and they weren't sure if the buses would work in that kind of weather, but since This Troper lived within the 3 km. limit...
- St. Louis, Missouri gets about three to five feet of snow per year. They typically can cope, but the schools will close if there's more than a couple inches. Pretty much everything else stays open. One recent winter was sufficiently severe that there were shortages of rock salt, and keeping the roads open was a challenge.
- This Troper can attest that this is a Truth In Television. A slight flurry shuts down the state.
- Ditto this troper. He lives in the southwest USA, where we get an average of.. about three snowfalls a winter (and most of those are melted by noon). Imagine the pandemonium when we got a snowstorm cold enough that it froze the freeway, which hadn't happened in something like thirty years.
- Truth in television to some extent in the UK, where even a light snowfall tends to lead to massive disruption to everything in the country.
- As can leaves on the train lines, or almost anything but rain.
- Literal truth in television when This Troper lived in Prince Edward Island; once or twice a winter, heavy snowdrifts would block the doors, making it difficult to leave the house. Sometimes the doors would freeze shut. And good luck driving in 16 inches of snow.
- This troper can vouch for the above To Kill A Mockingbird example, having gotten off of school for light snowfall when living in southern Georgia back in 1994. The rest of my class was going crazy over the sight of actual snow. I had grown up in Connecticut thus far and was wondering what all the fuss was about. And of course, anyone who lived in Connecticut, where I'd lived up until May 1993, or in New Jersey, where I've lived since May 1994, knows that that was the year with the horrible blizzard. I got lucky.
- "Horrible"? I was 5 for that and I thought it was awesome.
- This Troper, born during the arse-end 1991 Halloween blizzard in Minnesota, has only ever had a single snow day while in Minnesota, and that's only because 90% of the buses refused to start. On the flip side, he spent pre-school through first grade on an island off the cost of Florida in the Gulf of Mexico, and was not allowed outside for recess without a coat because it was 50 degrees Fahrenheit.
- I was just under one when that blizzard happened. The snow was higher than me, but I still went trick-or-treating. There are snow days in rural MN, but that is when there is 12 inches of snow after 2AM.
- A snowstorm normally won't shut down the school in this Troper's area. However, if we get an ice storm, ain't nobody going nowhere until we can thaw out the city!
- The Puget Sound area in Western Washington is weird about this... we can drive in all kinds of horrible rain that would cause massive road fatalities in Arizona. But if there's even the slightest hint of snow, schools are closed on a massive scale and people wonder if they have enough food to survive until the snow melts (usually later that afternoon). This wasn't helped by the mayor of Seattle who refused to have the roads salted or plowed downtown in 2008 after an abnormally huge snowstorm—he was worried about the effect it would have on the environment.
- Even better—that time was the first time in 19 years (I think) that people were actually snowed in, and for up to a week. Most areas got at least a foot of snow, and everywhere else got about two. Even better? Most of the greater-Seattle-area towns have, at most, one snow plow.
- When this troper arrived in Buffalo, New York for graduate school, she was advised that no amount of snow could bother anyone in the city, and classes would never be cancelled. Then, that October, there was a huge blizzard that became known as "the October surprise." Most of the city lost power, much of it for days, trees fell down everywhere and blocked the roads, and most of the city functions shut down while the rest struggled to help people without power get to a place where they weren't in danger of freezing to death. And yes, classes were cancelled. When the more normal snow and ice storms set in every other day during the wintry months, however, everything did go on as normal.
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