Thanks to Charles Dickens (and other authors affected by the Little Ice Age) many associate cold and snow with the perfect Christmas. This is a rather remarkable concept when you think about it, since the vast majority of the world where Christmas is celebrated, will rarely if ever see cold let alone snow.
When I was fourteen, my doctor told me that due to a tricky thyroid, I should pick one climate (any climate) and stick to it. It was excellent advice, and for the past forty years I have tried very hard to follow it, spending at least twenty-five of the last forty-years in an equitable climate with as little seasonal variation as climatically possible.
That said, I have had more than my fair share of the..."It can't be Christmas without cold," crowd, and all their merry illogicality.
This concept has always mystified me. When I was about twelve, I boldly questioned my mother on her use of Angel's Hair around our creche to replicate snow drifts, pointing out (quite logically I thought) that snow drifts, in a dessert, with a Mediterranean climate, was perhaps a stretch for any number of reasons. My precocity (as I recall) was not particularly cherished on this point, and the snow drifts stayed for as long as my mother decorated a creche. However, this did not negate my unquestionably valid point that the climatic band where snow is possible on December 25th, compared to the area where Christmas is celebrated, is grossly disproportionate.
Let's look for example at the Western Hemisphere. The five largest cities in the Americas in order are São Paulo, Mexico City, New York, Lima, and Bogotá; of those five, only two (New York and Bogota) have the remotest chance of it being cold on Christmas Day, let alone having snow. Although Mexico City (like Bogota) is at a high elevation (and as such, has weather cooler than its latitude would normally suggest) it is also located in a large valley that produces its own micro-climate. For São Paulo and Lima, Christmas comes during the first week of summer, and that same reality applies to Buenos Aires, Santiago, much of Africa, and all of Australia and New Zealand. And this doesn't even take into account the tropics, which although it does not have a large quantity of landmass, it does have a high concentration of population.
Perhaps it's not surprising then, that the places where we can expect to regularly find snow in December are the same places where we don't regularly expect to find people. In the Southern Hemisphere, this would be Antarctica, where unless you are a seal, a penguin or an semi-social research scientist, you have no normal business being. In the northern Hemisphere it's most of Canada, all of Alaska, and all of Siberia. Fun! Notice that the Russians never send political prisoners to the Caucuses or the Crimea. Is this a coincidence? I don't think so.
Even in the places that foisted this idyll on us (namely Europe and the British Isles) snow in December is a rarity, unless you happen to get far enough away from the Atlantic Ocean and that blessed Gulf Stream, to mitigate its equalizing affects on an otherwise lackluster climate. In the United States, roughly 45% of the contiguous states have a shot at a white Christmas, but oddly, outside of the Northeast and the Great Lake States, the population density drops precipitously (word-play is very much intended) much like it does in Canada, Alaska and Siberia. Another coincidence? I don't think so.
So the next time you hear someone dreamily mooning over the prospect of a white Christmas, console yourself with this: They are more likely talking about drifting sand then they are about drifting snow. Piña colada anyone?
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