A blanket of snow on Christmas Day might be the stuff of childhood memories, but how often does it actually happen in the UK?
It all depends on where you live. In Scotland, snowflakes have fallen on Christmas Day 37 times since 1960. This compares to 16 times in Northern Ireland and 16 in Wales. In England, it’s a matter of the north-south divide: northern England has had 26 white Christmases in that period, compared with 10 in the balmy south.
Snow would have been more likely several centuries ago. Between around1300 and 1850, the UK endured a “little ice age” that brought harsh winters. Dickens’s 1843 portrayal of a snowy London in A Christmas Carol was well within reasonable expectations at the time.
Fans of snowy winters have been reasonably well served in the last two decades. Climate change and increases in average temperatures have lowered the chance of snow, but the weather remains variable and, while there was widespread snow only once between 1971 and 1992, there have been six such occasions between 1993 and 2004.
