Traditional Christmas of white only in songs, cards

Bing Crosby didn’t have to dream of a white Christmas — he could bank on it.

The crooner was from Spokane, Wash., a city that is among the most likely to have a white Christmas each year. According to weather experts, Spokane has a white Christmas about 70 percent of the time.

In the United States, only a few high-latitude cities beat those odds: Duluth, Minn. (97 percent); Anchorage, Alaska, (90 percent); Marquette, Mich. (90 percent); and Concord, N.H. (87 percent).

Crosby’s song tapped into a primal need for many living in the northern latitudes, where the notion of a white Christmas takes on mythic proportions. But why is snow important to a holiday celebrating the birth of a child in the arid climate of the Middle East?

“I think that it’s simply because of the picture-perfect image of snow on Christmas that is constantly put into our heads through Christmas advertising and images of Santa Claus at the North Pole,” says Karin Bumbaco, assistant climatologist for Washington state.

“I think Americans prefer a white Christmas just because it’s drilled into our heads,” says Miss Bumbaco, whose cynical view is perhaps the result of working in Seattle, which has a white Christmas just 8 percent of the time.

The federal Western Regional Climate Center in Reno, Nev., gets flooded with calls this time of year from people asking if their town will get a white Christmas, says Jim Ashby, a climatologist at the center.

“They do care,” Mr. Ashby says.

Snow on Dec. 25 is so desirable that there are Web sites devoted to the odds of your city having snow that day. In the United Kingdom, it is possible to bet on whether there will be a white Christmas in places such as London or Glasgow.

The National Climatic Data Center studies the chances of a white Christmas in various U.S. cities. For the period from 1988 to 2005, the agency found that the probability of having an inch of snow on the ground on Dec. 25 ranged from 100 percent in Fairbanks, Alaska, to 1 percent in Phoenix. The District has a 13 percent chance.

The snow-happy can head to the Rockies, the Cascades and the Sierra Nevada in the West; the Upper Midwest; or northern New England, the National Weather Service says. They probably won’t need to shovel in Los Angeles, San Francisco, Portland, Ore., or Charlotte, N.C., where there’s a 1 percent chance of snow on Christmas Day.

There are lots of theories about why a white Christmas is considered desirable.

One credits Charles Dickens, author of “A Christmas Carol,” which was hugely influential in establishing various Christmas rituals. Dickens was born in 1812, and as a child he experienced a run of very cold, snowy winters during Europe’s “Little Ice Age.” His romanticized memory of those winters went into the book.

In the past, snow meant horse-pulled sleighs, which made it easier for people to get together for the holiday. Nostalgic illustrations, such as Norman Rockwell’s snowy Christmas scenes, also played a role.

The term “white Christmas” was immortalized in the song of the same name, written in 1940 by Irving Berlin for the movie “Holiday Inn.” Crosby’s version of the melancholy tune was a phenomenon and is widely considered the best-selling single of all time.

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