Forget the white Christmas – it’s time for a rebrand
IF YOU close your eyes and strain your ears you just might be able to hear it – not Santa’s jingling cavalcade, but the jet stream barrelling over the Atlantic, bringing with it all the wind and rain one might expect.
Any hope that the recent cold weather might persist until Christmas Day has vanished like a snowman in a rainstorm.
The north of Scotland might just prove a last redoubt. For the rest of us expect wet, windy and possibly stormy weather. Perhaps even persisting all the way into the New Year.
Traditionally a mild Christmas was deemed a very bad thing. “A green Christmas makes a fat churchyard”, the old saying goes.
The fear was that if it did not get cold enough, fleas that carry the plague would not be killed off, meaning an outbreak the following year.
I suppose the modern equivalent is the biblical deluge that has swamped many homes over recent Christmases. One hopes that the rain predicted this year does not cause any such chaos.
Perhaps it is time to modernise our notion of what weather to expect on Christmas Day?
After all, a white Christmas was far more frequent in the 18th and 19th centuries and even more so before the change of calendar in September 1752, which made Christmas Day 11 days early.
You need to cast your minds back to 2010 for the last time we had a widespread white Christmas with snow recorded at 83 per cent of the Met Office weather stations.
If green Christmases are to be the norm I think we should embark on a re-branding exercise to celebrate rain and spare the inevitable disappointment.
We could start by ditching those ridiculous Christmas jumpers for a sturdy cagoule.