On the 3rd day before Christmas... the arrival of snow is anticipated
How fantastic it would be to wake up on Christmas morning, pull back the curtains and see the landscape covered by a thick layer of snow. All those nasty concrete outbuildings carefully blanketed, the footprints of robins scattered randomly across the lawn and Aled Jones frolicking in the lane with a couple of snowballs. Picture postcard perfect. We love snow at Christmas because it's the one day of the year most of us don't have to travel anywhere. We're already where we want need to be, the entire public transport network has already been shut down for the day and we couldn't drive safely anywhere after that pre-lunch sherry anyway. Any other day of the year and we'd all be cursing the nightmarish collapse all all local services but, on December 25th, 's no problem.
Will there be a White Christmas this year? Well, no, sorry, there won't. Even this morning, when snow was actually forecast, the streets of London remain resolutely grey. Alas, a snowy Christmas Day in the UK is a rare event. Even rarer is a 'proper' white Christmas, rather than the 'a flake of sleet will do' travesty of a definition that the bookies now use. December's always been a bit early in the winter for snow (January and February are rather more likely), and global warming threatens to make the entire 21st century a bit late in the millennium for snow too. White Christmases were rather more common here during the 'Little Ice Age', back when the Thames used to regularly freeze over, but the last London Frost fair was held as long ago as 1814. In the future any light sprinkling of white across the capital is far more likely to be the result of terrorist-induced nuclear fallout.
Only ten of the last Christmases in London have been white. That'd be 1916 (sleet), 1927 (snow, falling and lying), 1938 (sleet, but 15cm of snow lying on the ground), 1956 (snow), 1964 (snow), 1968 (sleet), 1970 (snow, falling and lying), 1976 (snow), 1996 (sleet) and 1999 (sleet). You may also remember a white 1981, but that year doesn't officially count because no snow fell on Christmas Day itself. Me, I remember 1970 well enough, which may be just as well because if I were any older I probably wouldn't be able to remember a proper white Christmas at all. Alas, today's children have probably missed out on seeing one for good.
On the 3rd day before Christmas...
