white Christmas

English

Pronunciation

• Audio (Southern England):

  (file)

Noun

white Christmas (plural white Christmases)

1. A Christmas Day or Christmas Eve on which there is a ground covering of snow or snowfall.

   Antonym: black Christmas

   • 1905, Annie Fellows Johnston, chapter 8, in The Little Colonel′s Christmas Vacation:

     “It′s like frozen thistle-down!” she cried. “I hope it will snow all day and all night until everything is covered. I never saw a white Christmas.”

   • 1945 December 31, “The Big Snow”, in Life, page 23:

     In New York City 10,000 men struggled to clear away the heavy snow which promised New Yorkers their first white Christmas in 15 years, […] .

   • 2008 December 18, David Bruser, “Thanks to more storms, Christmas may be white”, in Toronto Star, page A2:

     At Environment Canada, senior climatologist David Phillips′ standard for a white Christmas calls for at least two centimeters of snow on the ground at 7 a.m. . . . “In England, if a weather guy sees a snowflake, they call it a white Christmas.”

Derived terms

• white Christmas slice

Translations

a Christmas Day or Eve with snow

• Dutch: witte kerst (nl) m or f
• Finnish: valkea joulu, valkoinen joulu
• French: Noël blanc (fr) m
• Japanese: ホワイトクリスマス (ja) (howaito kurisumasu)
• Portuguese: Natal branco m
• Swedish: vit jul (sv) c

See also

• snow day
• white Easter