White christmas

How it works

The calendar part is simple. Christmas Day is 25 December. A white Christmas is a weather claim about that date at a place. It is not a week of snow in December. It is not frost without snow. It is not a forecast for the 24th that melts overnight. If you care about the claim, you have to name the place and the rule.

Rules differ. In the United Kingdom, a common Met Office test has been whether a snowflake is observed falling in the 24 hours of Christmas Day at a site. Lying snow is a separate, stricter picture: snow on the ground, which a single flake in the air does not guarantee. In parts of the United States, people talk about a white Christmas when a set depth of snow is already on the ground on the morning of the 25th. Those are not the same event. A flake in London and a covered lawn in Minnesota can both be called “white” in casual speech. They are not interchangeable measurements.

You cannot order the weather. You can only read a forecast as it tightens in the last days of December, then look out of the window on the day. A white Christmas in one city is ordinary rain in the next city. Altitude, coast, and whether the ground was already frozen matter more than the wish in the song.

Bing Crosby, Irving Berlin, and White Christmas the film

Bing Crosby white Christmas begins as a song. Irving Berlin wrote “White Christmas.” Crosby’s recording, first issued in the early 1940s and heard in the film Holiday Inn, is the version most people mean when they say the title out loud. The lyric is homesick: the singer is somewhere without snow, remembering trees and meadows at Christmas. It is a memory of weather, not a weather report.

White Christmas Bing Crosby also names a 1954 film, White Christmas, in which Crosby stars with Danny Kaye, Rosemary Clooney, and Vera-Ellen. The film is a musical about a show, a Vermont inn, and the same song. It is set in the holiday season. It is not a documentary about snowfall. If you put the film on in a warm room, you still get a white Christmas in the soundtrack sense, and you may get none at the window.

Play the record whenever you like. The weather meaning still attaches only to 25 December. That split is the whole puzzle of the phrase: one half is a date, the other half is a tune you can queue in July.

Weather meaning: snow associated with 25 December at a named place, by a named rule. Song meaning: Berlin’s “White Christmas” as sung by Crosby and by everyone who covered it later. Film meaning: the 1954 musical titled White Christmas, with Crosby in the lead. Wish meaning: the hope that the first two will coincide this year.

Snow on the day versus snow in the song

People argue about white Christmases because they are arguing about different tests. A child wants the garden covered. A statistician wants a station reading. A film fan wants Crosby. Say which one you mean before you bet a walk or a roast on it. Frost flowers on a window are pretty and are not snow. Sleet that turns to rain by noon may satisfy a flake-count and still leave a black road.

A white Christmas is weather on one date. Crosby will still sing if the pavement is wet. If you are travelling for the holiday, pack for the climate you are entering, not for the lyric. Northern interiors and high ground are likelier to have lying snow than mild coasts, in ordinary winters, but “likelier” is not a promise for this 25 December. Look at the forecast for that town in the last forty-eight hours, then look again on the morning.