Diego Arguedas Ortiz

In the UK, Christmas is usually snowless. So why do we still picture the ‘ideal’ Christmas as a white one?

It was 25 December, and little George Adamson ran to the window, hoping to find a white world on the other side. But once he drew the curtains, disappointment set in. It was another year without snow on Christmas Day.

Now, as a geography lecturer at King’s College London, he knows who to blame for his misplaced expectations: Charles Dickens, who populated his stories with snowy depictions of the holiday period. 

That people like him imagine a snow-covered Christmas has always intrigued Adamson. In the UK, where he grew up, December is not a particularly snowy month – yet shops sell cards with white Christmas illustrations and restaurants decorate with fake snow. Where are people taking on these expectations if they haven’t lived them?

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Scholars believe that it comes from cultural messaging. And crucially, from the very frosty decade of 1810.

In turn, the prominence of Dickens’ writings permeated our imagination.

In turn, the prominence of Dickens’ writings permeated our imagination.

Dickens “grew up during the coldest decade England has seen since the 1690s and his short stories and A Christmas Carol seem to owe much to his impressionable years”, writes anthropologist Brian Fagan in his book The Little Ice Age.  

It was so icy during Dickens’s early years that the River Thames froze in February of 1814. London celebrated its final Thames frost fair that year, which included people setting up tents on the ice for four days and an elephant being led across the river just below Blackfriars Bridge. For the young Dickens, who was born in 1812, Christmas must have been a bitterly cold experience.

Years later, when Dickens sat down to write his novels and short stories, the author populated them with his memories of what Christmas looked like back then.