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Last week, I got to step into the spotlight as an ensemble cast member in the Alley Theatre’s production of A Christmas Carol! Talk about a throwback to my high school theatre days - so much fun. Beyond the excitement of being on stage, something in the final scene really stuck with me. In the closing scene of A Christmas Carol, it snows on stage. It got me thinking, not just about how magical theatre can be, but also about the weather and how we picture the holidays.
There’s just something enchanting about the idea of a white Christmas. Flip through your stack of Christmas cards, and I bet you’ll find a few with snow-covered rooftops, warm lights glowing through frosted windows, and a cozy trail of chimney smoke curling into the sky. Funny enough, even my friends from Australia - where December is a summer month - have Christmas cards with snowy scenes.
It’s not just cards, either. Snow and Christmas go together. Twas the Night Before Christmas, How the Grinch Stole Christmas, It’s a Wonderful Life, and even those timeless Norman Rockwell paintings all paint the holidays in shades of frosty white. It’s like snow has become the universal symbol of holiday magic, no matter where you live.
These snowy holiday scenes didn’t just come out of thin air. Charles Dickens had some frosty inspiration when he wrote A Christmas Carol in London back in 1843. He lived during what’s now called The Little Ice Age, a time when winters were downright freezing. Dickens, born in 1812 in Victorian England, grew up in a world where the Earth was cold!
How cold? During the early 1800s, global temperatures were 3.6°F below the thousand-year average. It was so cold in 1814 that the Thames River froze solid—something that hasn’t happened since! Between 1318 and 1814, the Thames froze over an impressive 23 times. No wonder Dickens filled his Christmas story with snowy streets and ice; it snowed nearly every Christmas during his childhood! Compare that to today, where the U.K. sees a white Christmas only about once every six years.
One of my all-time favorite Christmas movies - besides Christmas Vacation, of course, because who doesn’t love Cousin Eddie and snow-covered chaos - is White Christmas by Irving Berlin. In it, Bing Crosby croons about dreaming of a white Christmas, just like the ones he used to know. And guess what? For Berlin, those snowy Christmases weren’t just a dream.
Berlin was born in Tyumen, Russia, in Siberia - a place where the yearly average temperature hovers around a frosty 55°F. Let’s just say white Christmases were pretty much guaranteed! He had plenty of snowy inspiration before immigrating to the U.S. to gift us one of the most iconic holiday songs ever. It’s no wonder his lyrics make us all wish for a snow-globe kind of Christmas.
I’ll never forget working the overnight shift from Christmas Eve to Christmas morning in 2004. Snow was moving in from the west, and I was on TV tracking the heaviest bands falling south of I-10. It was dark, so I couldn’t see how much was piling up, but I just knew people were going to wake up to something extraordinary - a white Christmas!
Sure enough, several inches fell throughout the night, and when morning came, the emails started pouring in. People were overjoyed, describing the pure magic of waking up to snow-covered lawns, rooftops, and streets. It was a sight we’d never seen before and haven’t since. 2004 gave parts of the Houston area its first white Christmas in recorded history, and the memories of that snow still feel like a holiday gift.
