Will we have a White Christmas? Where I live, it looks like rain.
There was a time when I remembered snow at Christmas.
There’s a saying you hear from a certain age group — “We had proper winters back then.”
It’s usually said after a light dusting of snow causes the entire country to come to a standstill, or the occasional road hasn’t been gritted by the council de-icing trucks. And the telly weather forecaster on 24-hour news gets overexcited about “the possibility of flurries on higher ground”.
Whatever Happened To Snow?
But if you grew up in the 1960s or 70s, you’ll remember that we didn’t need to be warned about flurries. Snow arrived with confidence, and it was expected — the possibility of a white Christmas was high — years before Bing Crosby had told us so.
Christmas snow was a given. It didn’t tiptoe in overnight like it does now. It marched in, dumped itself in great heaps across every road, garden and playground, and hung around for weeks. It was nice until after a few days it turned to ice, and you spent a week or two looking like a candidate for Britain’s ice skating Winter Olympics team.
Of course, back then, we didn’t have the 24-hour weather news or apps sending red alerts to our phones on the hour. We had the local milkman. I think his name was Stan, whose arrival at the doorstep was the first sign of how serious things were.
“Cold today, I’ve had to put my gloves on. You won’t need to put these in the fridge.” He said, as the snow fell, covering the top of his hat.
Which was good, because I can’t remember whether we had a fridge back in the 1960s. Many of those mod cons didn’t arrive for us until the 1970s onwards.
Proper Snow
For us, when it snowed, it changed the whole rhythm of life, especially if you were a kid. We wanted snow, as it meant building snowmen and snowball fighting. It was the usual romantic thinking: waking up to a world made soft and silent, other than the crunch of boots on fresh white powder and the breath clouds forming in front of your face.