NOTHING says Christmas like a picture-postcard snow scene, on the cover of COUNTRY LIFE, on a glitter-frosted greetings card or on a festive biscuit tin. The Christmas of our imagination—and, indeed, our dreams—is resolutely white. Yet why is this, when so rarely does the big day bring a blanket of snow?
At first glance, it seems logical to credit Charles Dickens with our yearning for a white Christmas. The theory goes that it was his own bitterly cold (although heartwarmingly happy) childhood Christmases that inspired him to give both The Pickwick Papers and A Christmas Carol a snowcovered backdrop and that, in doing so, he created a lasting feeling that the very best Christmases were white.
Certainly, born in 1812, Dickens experienced six white Christmases in the first nine years of his life. However, dig a little deeper into the snowdrifts of centuries past and it’s clear that the association pre-dates the author. He was by no means the first to pen a snowy festive scene and certainly not the first, nor the last, to experience one.
Between roughly 1550 and 1880, Britain was in the grip of what has become popularly known as the Little Ice Age—a period of intensely cold winters. Forget treetops glistening, frosts were persistently harsh and forbidding. The Thames froze solid with regularity until 1814; that it didn’t freeze so completely in later years is generally acknowledged to be the result
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