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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).

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 one 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:
  • A blizzard isolates the Overlook Hotel in The Shining.
  • 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."
  • An episode of Hey Arnold.
  • Dexters Laboratory.
  • The Simpsons did this on several occasions.
  • Snow Day, one of those awful 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.
  • The webcomic Perry Bible Fellowship had something like this, but with a twist.
  • 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.
  • Done in an episode of South Park. Cannibalism ensued.
  • 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 Daria episode "Antisocial Climbers".
  • 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.
  • Murder On The Orient Express
  • 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.
  • In To Kill A Mockingbird, the kids get the day off from school because of a light snowfall, a rarity in Alabama.
    • This Troper can attest that this is a Truth In Television. A slight flurry shuts down the state.
  • 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
  • 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.