Publisher’s Perspective

By Tim Douglass, Publisher of the Pope County Tribune

By most weather predictions, we will experience a “brown Christmas” this year.  There is some precipitation on the way to Minnesota, but because of higher temperatures it will likely fall as rain, rather than a Christmas snow.

More people than I’d like have told me they have had trouble getting into the Christmas spirit this year.  The main reason, they say, is that if feels more like Thanksgiving than Christmas in Minnesota.

If there’s no snow around for Christmas, when will the snow fall?

“There is no indication any time soon of any major snow systems in the near future,” according to Joe Calderone, a meteorologist with the National Weather Service’s Twin Cities office.  He spoke to a reporter from the St. Paul Pioneer Press.  Of course, the focus was on the Twin Cities, but a lot of the same information goes for Pope County.  Here’s some information that news story provided.

A white Christmas has happened 71 percent of the time in the Twin Cities in the last 124 years, according to the Minnesota Department of Natural Resources

From 1899 to 2022, there were 36 “brown Christmases,” with either no or a trace reported snow depth on Christmas.

The last brown Christmas was in 2021 when warm temperatures melted snow on the ground on Christmas Eve.

There was also no measurable snow on the ground on Dec. 25 in 2015 and 2018.

The deepest snow cover on record on Dec. 25 was in 1983 with a hefty 20 inches and a high of 1 degree, according to the DNR.

But the coldest Christmas in the Twin Cities was in 1996 with a high temperature of 9 below zero. The warmest Christmas was 51 degrees in 1922.

“There was not a white Christmas that year. In fact, the Minneapolis Weather Bureau log book for that day states that the day felt ‘spring-like,’” the DNR wrote.

For the month of December, 11.9 inches of snowfall is considered normal for the Twin Cities. As of Friday, only 1.3 inches of snow had fallen and disappeared.

Chances each year for a white Christmas vary across the state. Parts of southwestern Minnesota see white Christmases as little as 55 percent of the time, while in parts of northern Minnesota, it’s a near certainty, according to the Minnesota Climatology Working Group.

In Central Minnesota, it’s somewhere in between, but this year, we are looking at a brown Christmas.

Don’t let a brown Christmas bring you down.  Consider that we are a good month through the typical winter and we haven’t had the cold, snowy weather we can get this time of year.  That shortens what can be a long winter.

As long as it gets cold enough to ice fish safely, I okay with this atypical winter.

Merry Christmas to all and a Happy, healthy and prosperous New Year!