Why are we obsessed with white Christmases?

Why, when all our experience promises us that it will be mild, grey and wet, do we so determinedly associate Christmas with snow? Why is every other Christmas card blanketed in the stuff, every TV commercial like some winter scene from Heidi, and every shop draped with toboggans and sledges, snowmen and snowflakes? Even Christmas cakes are white. Yet on the rare occasions we do get a dusting during the festive season, it invariably leads to motorway mayhem, cancelled football matches, rail chaos, power failures, slush and moaning. So what’s going on? The answer is Charles Dickens. Our snow fixation dates from the publication of A Christmas Carol on December 17, 1843, an event that launched the repackaging of Christmas celebrations.

An instant bestseller, the 6,000 copies of the first edition had sold out by Christmas Eve. The “piercing, searching, biting cold” of Scrooge’s snowy Christmas Eve, whereupon “the people made a rough, but brisk and not unpleasant kind of music, in scraping the snow from the pavement” was inspired by the run of spectacularly cold Christmases that Dickens experienced as a child.

Born in 1812, the first decade of Dickens’s life was one of the coldest of the millennium, and the peak of the climatic period known as “The Little Ice Age”: six Christmases were white with snow or frost. The last Frost Fair, when the Thames froze over, was in 1814. Dickens’s romanticised recreation of these winters has done more than anything to influence our yearning for snow at Christmas.

When we started researching a book about how the weather has affected the culture and history of these isles, the degree of romance and implacable optimism (or, perhaps, just sound commercial nous) regarding Christmas weather, struck us as extraordinary. For the 164 years since A Christmas Carol was published, hope has continually, triumphed over experience.

According to the traditional bet – one flake of snow to fall on the London Weather Centre during the 24 hours of December 25 – there were only a handful of “officially” white Christmases in the 20th century (and though 2004 was close, none so far this century). Expand the definition to include snow lying from previous falls, the total nudges up: 1981, 1976, 1970, 1964, 1956, 1938, 1927 and 1916 were all notable years, though most of these failed to deliver enough snow to make snowmen, have snowball fights or enact even the least ambitious, archetypal Christmas card scene.

The probability of a white Christmas is, for London, less than 10 per cent. And – without wishing to appear killjoys – the chances are declining further with global warming. December is more of a late-autumn month in Britain now, characterised by rain and gales with colder, foggy interludes, rather than the iron-hard frosts and blanketing snow of Dickens’s youth. Not, of course, that this will have the slightest effect on our collective national derangement. Snow remains far too influential a sales tool on the high street for this nation of shopkeepers to think of giving it up.

The Wrong Kind of Snow: The Complete Daily Companion to the British Weather, (Hodder & Stoughton)

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