For many of us, snow is synonymous with Christmas. Bing Crosby famously dreamed of it, while movies, advent calendars and Christmas cards are all decorated with snow-filled scenes of a white Christmas. However, for most parts of the United Kingdom, Christmas is only at the beginning of the period when it’s likely to snow. For the Met Office — the equivalent of the National Weather Service in the U.S. — to declare a “white Christmas,” a single snowflake has to be observed falling within the 24 hours of December 25th by either an official Met Office observer or an automated weather station. That’s because it needs to be officially verified for climate records and to provide consistency and certainty. There has only been a widespread covering of snow on the ground four times since 1960 — in 1981, 1995, 2009 and 2010. Technically, 2023 was the last white Christmas in the UK, with 11% of stations reporting snow falling, though none reported snow lying on the ground. The country is more likely to see snow in January and February than it is in December, with snow actually settling on the ground an average of three days in December.
