Sean Batty: How the Victorians warped our view of Christmas weather

Most of us dream of a white Christmas, but in reality, we’re far more likely to get buckets of rain, blustery winds and the odd storm.

So where did our snowy Christmas dream come from – and why are our Christmas cards always covered in snow?

Firstly, Christmas doesn’t actually fall in the “deep midwinter”, despite what the carols suggest. It lands right at the start of winter, with the season only beginning on December 21. Our coldest and snowiest weather usually doesn’t arrive until January and February, once Arctic air has really cooled down.

The reason our cards, stories, films and decorations are so snowy is largely down to the Victorians. They reinvented Christmas during a time when winters were much colder – the tail end of the Little Ice Age in the early to mid-1800s. Frozen rivers, snow-blanketed towns and ice skating on lochs were far more common, so when the first Christmas cards were created, snowy scenes were simply everyday winter life.

It was also in this era, in the 1840s, that Charles Dickens wrote A Christmas Carol. His childhood was filled with white winters, so his famous story is packed with frost, fog and snow – images that have shaped our idea of Christmas ever since.

So the classic snowy Christmas is really a legacy of those colder Victorian winters, carried forward through postcards, films and adverts. It does make you wonder… if the 1800s had been as mild and wet as today, would we now have Christmas cards showing robins in puddles and rain-soaked carol singers? Christmas could have looked very different. As for me, I sometimes think I was born 200 years too late – although saying that, I think I’d miss coming home to my central heating!

For a moment, it felt like Victorian winters were making a comeback in 2009 and 2010. Many places had snow lying on Christmas Day and snow falling too – our last proper widespread white Christmases, and a period I remember fondly as living the dream.

Since then, it’s mostly been brief cold snaps and sleety showers, rarely the magical scenes we hope for. In fact, last year brought the mildest Christmas morning on record in the Highlands, with overnight temperatures on Christmas Eve and Christmas morning not dropping below 12°C.

If you’re hunting for the best chances of a white Christmas in recent decades, Leadhills in South Lanarkshire leads the pack with 13 white Christmases since 1990, followed by Aviemore with 11. Kindrogan in Perthshire also holds the record for Christmas Day snow depth – an impressive 47cm on Christmas morning in 1981.

But with our climate warming, snow in winter is becoming rarer, never mind on Christmas Day. As snow days continue to dwindle, white Christmases will become more of a distant dream, with many children today seeing snow far less often than we did – and in some years, not at all away from the mountains.

So when the snow does arrive, don’t waste a moment. Get outside and enjoy it – a beautiful reminder of nature’s magic, and an increasingly rare visitor to Scotland.