It didn’t look anything like this. Photo by Brian Allen.
If you’re one of those people who romanticize about having an actual white Christmas—with waking up on December 25 to a blanket of fresh snow on the ground—D.C. is not a place for you.
As the Capital Weather Gang notes, not only are our chances for snow on Thursday slim-to-none, but the temperature might even be in the mid-60s. The 60s!
While some severe snowstorms every five or six years isn’t uncommon for the D.C. region, when’s the last time we had an actual white Christmas? And how often does that happen? The last time was in 2002 and it doesn’t happen that often, obviously. According to Weather Underground, a damn fascinating website for tracking the history of weather in different places, the last time it snowed on Christmas was in 2002, and even then it was barely snow; we got less than an inch.
In fact, in the past 127 years, it’s snowed on Christmas in D.C. less than ten times. Here are the top six Christmas snow totals, from an older CWG article:
1… 1962 … 5.4 INCHES
2… 1909 … 4.5 INCHES
3… 1969 … 4.3 INCHES
4… 1902 … 1.0 INCHES
5… 1935 … 0.6 INCHES
6… 1892 … 0.5 INCHES
Of course, you may recall seeing snow on the ground in 2009, back when we were just starting to use the word “snowpocalypse” to death. You are not wrong. There was snow on the ground on December 25, 2009, but it was from a previous snowstorms. By that time, the D.C. area had already accumulated more than 16 inches of snow. But it didn’t come down on Christmas day.