The Ghost of White Christmas Past

“By this time it was getting dark, and snowing pretty heavily; and as Scrooge and the Spirit went along the streets, the brightness of the roaring fires in kitchens, parlours, and all sorts of rooms was wonderful.” – Charles Dickens, A Christmas Carol,

I found myself walking back from the Main Library at midnight, with deadline season leaving me feeling decidedly Scrooge-ish. Battling the freezing winds, I trudged past the warmly lit flats on College Street, where groups of friends were cheerfully pre-ing for a night at 601, while I sulked home, burdened by the thought of finishing my essay. I cursed the sky, thinking the least it could do was produce a dusting of snow to lift my spirits. I went to bed that night, dreaming I’d wake up to a fresh blanket of snow. Of course, my wish did not come true, but I began to wonder: why is it that we all mark snow as the condition for the festive season? I don’t think it snowed in Bethlehem; who’s got us dreaming of a white Christmas?

Every year, the nation is overtaken by predictions of whether we’ll have a white Christmas. From Time Out to the BBC to the Met Office, the UK's national meteorological service, publications are laying out facts and statistics to determine this year’s luck. Humorously enough, the findings are usually rather similar — unless you’re in remote areas of the highlands, chances are pretty slim. In fact, the last time London got a white Christmas was back in 1999, and only five other times going back to 1960. We can tell that historically, there is actually very little meteorological evidence for our association of snow with Christmas.

This mania has gone as far as having people irrationally bet on the most unpredictable of phenomena, the weather. Reports this week of a brief snowfall down south caused a massive flurry of bets for snow on Christmas day on OLBG, a platform where you can bet on the chances of a white Christmas based on location. Edinburgh is going strong at a solid 2/1. There’s something strangely poetic about it — adults gambling on the dream of snow, much like children clinging to their belief in Santa Claus.

I blame nostalgia. For many of us, snow has become synonymous with childhood Christmases — school ski trips, snowball fights, the annual class Polar Express viewing, the magical snowfall on stage during a Nutcracker performance or reading of the bitter winters in A Christmas Carol. We owe a large part of our modern conception of a ‘white Christmas’ to Dickens himself, whose work shaped this enduring idea that the very best of Christmases were white. Coincidentally, Dickens’ childhood unfolded during a decade of exceptionally cold weather, a period often referred to as the ‘Little Ice Age.’ These chilling Victorian winters inspired the “clear, bright, jovial, stirring, cold” scenes he described in his works. Just as we nostalgically reflect on our childhood Christmases, Dickens did the same, weaving his memories into A Christmas Carol and The Pickwick Papers. 

From there, Victorian Christmas traditions flourished, eventually giving rise to Bing Crosby’s timeless song, ‘White Christmas’. Like Dickens, Crosby yearned for a “white Christmas, just like the ones [he] used to know.” And though other works, such as the American poem ’Twas the Night Before Christmas, contributed to our modern understanding, it’s Dickens who can undoubtedly be called the father of our snowy Christmas myth.

From what I remember, my childhood Christmases were decidedly white, but looking back, meteorological evidence says otherwise. But, now, we are haunted by the fact that the magic may never return. In this sense, I think a white Christmas is rather a metaphor for our nostalgia for ghosts of Christmas past and for the solace we find within them. A little less bitter than when I began, I think our collective delusions of a white Christmas won’t hurt anybody. And like a child dreaming of Santa, I'll still go to sleep, foolishly dreaming of a white Christmas morning.

Photo by Anna-Marie Regner