Charlotte: A White Christmas?

Right around Christmas time, especially on Christmas Day, we start thinking about snow and having a white Christmas. There's something about the snow being on the ground and the snow falling on Christmas day that makes your heart warm just a little bit more as you stay home with your family, open presents, and eat Christmas meals.

Charlotte hasn't had snow on Christmas Day for quite a long time. In fact, Charlotte has only seen measurable snow on Christmas Day four times in 144 years. The most recent was in 2010, when we picked up 0.4. Before that, it was in 1947 when 5.8” of snow fell.

In the past 144 years, Charlotte has had eight Christmases with a trace of snow.

According to this year's forecast for the Charlotte area on Christmas Day (Wednesday, 12/25), it will be 53 degrees with a 35 percent chance of showers, so again, no white Christmas.

I was born in Southern California, so a white Christmas was not a thing, but when I moved to Utah as a young child, a white Christmas was all we ever saw, and I fell in love with the snow. Although I look for snow always during Christmas and secretly expect it on the big day, each Christmas, I don't often get to see it, so I have to turn to movies to experience the white stuff during the holiday.

"White Christmas" is a song reminiscing about an old-fashioned Christmas setting. Written by Irving Berlin for the 1942 musical film Holiday Inn, the song won the Academy Award for Best Original Song at the 15th Academy Awards. Originally sung by Bing Crosby, it topped the Billboard chart for 11 weeks and returned to the number one position again in December 1943 and 1944. His version would return to the top 40 a dozen times in subsequent years.

According to The History Channel, Berlin wrote "White Christmas" in 1940, in warm La Quinta, California, while staying at the La Quinta Hotel, a frequent Hollywood retreat also favored by writer-director-producer Frank Capra. He often stayed up all night writing. One day, he told his secretary, "I want you to take down a song I wrote over the weekend. Not only is it the best song I ever wrote, it's the best song anybody ever wrote."

White Christmas is a 1954 musical film directed by Michael Curtiz and starring Bing Crosby, Danny Kaye, Rosemary Clooney, and Vera-Ellen. Filmed in Technicolor, it features the songs of Irving Berlin, including a new version of the title song, "White Christmas," introduced by Crosby in the 1942 film Holiday Inn.