Driving along the highway on my way to a holiday-themed board game night Friday, my phone pinged with an alert from a news app. Letting my curiosity get the better of me, I sneaked a quick peak to read the headline: “Weather 180 to Bring Snow Christmas Day”. My eyes lit up with thrill, my smile widened with excitement. Could this be the year my childhood dream came true?
As a kid, every December without fail, I’d hope to wake up to a lit Christmas tree surrounded by presents against a backdrop of snowy magic… but most times I’d end up eating Xmas lunch on the porch with shades on. Don’t get me wrong, the weather in Athens is a dream, but if you’re looking for Bing Crosby’s description of a “winter wonderland”, the Mediterranean probably isn’t the right place to be.
My yearning for some frosty cheer awakened the sleuth within me and took me far back into history to see just how many times, if any, Athenians have been lucky enough to experience a “white Christmas”.
A frostless trip through time
According to reports, Athens has woken up to a blanket of snow on Christmas day only four times since the start of the 20th century, the first year being 1902. However, since Greece still followed the Julian calendar until 1923, December 25 today was December 12 then. Nevertheless, in an effort to sway the numbers in my favor, I include it in the count (beggars can’t be choosers!) After that, Athens saw snow on Christmas Day in 1949 and 1968, while the city went to bed on a snowy Christmas Eve in 1962 and 1992. Snowflakes also made a brief appearance in 1986, but not enough to make the count a full five.
There have also been years when Athens was covered in snow on days adjacent to Christmas, which earns them an honorable mention. It snowed on Boxing Day in 1991, in what was one of the whitest Decembers in the city, as it snowed on eight separate days that month. New Year celebrations have generally been “whiter”, as calendars reset in a snowy landscape in 1906, 1912, 1942, 1978, 1983 and 1992.
Rare snowfall covers the archaeological site on the Acropolis in Athens, Greece. EPA/Louisa Gouliamaki
Interestingly enough, Northern Greece hasn’t seen many more frosty Xmas mornings, although, granted, it gets its fair share of white landscapes later in the winter. According to data from meteo.gr, the last time the North experienced significant snow cover on Christmas Day was in 2001, when snow covered over 60% of the country. In fact, Ioannina in northwestern Greece, a top Yuletide destination , hasn’t seen a white Christmas since 1986. And while Thessaloniki saw a heavy snowstorm in the lead-up to Christmas in 2001, no reports indicate snowflakes on the actual day; even if they did appear, the city shared Ioannina’s 15-year snowless streak until then.
To make matters even less merry, a meteo.gr analysis of snowfall data by decade reveals a significant decline in holiday snow coverage over 2011-2020 compared to the two previous decades. The most notable reduction has occurred in Western Macedonia, where snow coverage on Christmas Day over the past decade is 50% down compared to 1991-2000.
A global scam!
When my deep dive into Greece’s snowy encounters (or lack thereof) left me feeling gloomy, I widened my search to find out which spots around the globe actually live the white Christmas dream.
And it turns out the fantasy remains just that for much of the world!
According to Forbes, nearly half of all American households reside in counties where fewer than 10% of Christmases since 1980 have been white. In fact, just 19% of U.S. households live in places where at least 50% of Christmases have been snowy.
Across the Atlantic, snow on Christmas Day is more frequent in countries like Norway, Sweden, Finland, Russia, and the Baltic states. While mountain regions like the Alps and Carpathian Mountains regularly see snow, cities in southern France and Italy are far less likely to experience a snowy Christmas. In the U.K., there’s snow at Christmas every 6 years on average, but London, for example, had only six white Christmases between 1960 and 2020, with stretches of up to 20 years without any Xmas snow at all.
Big Ben clock tower is seen on a snow-covered morning in central London, January 24, 2007.REUTERS/Toby Melville (BRITAIN)
Greece’s increasingly frost-free Christmases is a trend that’s echoed around the globe. In the U.K., white Christmases, which occurred every 3-4 years in the 1970s, are now expected only once every 5-8 years due to rising temperatures. In fact, a 2020 study predicted that snow could disappear from the country entirely by the end of the century! In the U.S., 64% of locations have experienced a decreased chance of a white Christmas compared to the 1981-2010 average.
So why do we dream of a white Christmas?
Despite the facts saying otherwise, people seem to have always associated yuletide magic with a heavy blanket of snow.
Two specific creations are unofficially credited for cementing the obsession with a snowy paradise.
The first is none other than the novel A Christmas Carol (1843). Charles Dickens, the father of modern Christmas, begins his story on a snow-covered Christmas Eve. Unlike others after him, however, his description of a frosty white holiday was actually based on fact rather than fantasy! Indeed, Dickens’ lifetime coincided with an era known as the Little Ice Age, which saw freezing temperatures across the Northern Hemisphere as several mountain glaciers across the world expanded. So snow, and a lot of it, was common during the holidays back then. His book was so famous that it helped shape the now quintessential festive landscape.
The second masterpiece is, of course, the song “White Christmas”. Written by Irving Berlin and sung by worldwide heartthrob Bing Crosby in the summer of 1942, the nostalgic holiday song is actually the best-selling single of all time. Crosby’s crooning about white Christmases past was reason enough to idealize winter wonderlands–and for the song to top the charts… in October. However, Berlin may well have had another source of frosty inspiration: he was born in Siberia! His experiences of “snow globe” Christmases before emigrating to the US gifted the world one of the most iconic holiday songs ever.
