White Christmas

A white Christmas is a Christmas with the presence of snow: either on Christmas Eve or on Christmas Day, depending on local tradition.

Snow pertains to frozen crystalline water throughout its life cycle, starting when it precipitates from clouds and accumulates on surfaces, then metamorphoses in place, and ultimately melts, slides or sublimates away.

Christmas or Christmas Day is an annual festival commemorating the birth of Jesus Christ, observed most commonly on December 25 as a religious and cultural celebration among billions of people around the world.

Christmas Eve is the evening or entire day before Christmas Day, the festival commemorating the birth of Jesus.

Michael Bublé - White Christmas [Official Animated Video] by Michael Bublé

This phenomenon is most common in the northern countries of the Northern Hemisphere.

The Northern Hemisphere of Earth is the half that is north of the equator.

Eric Clapton - White Christmas (Official Music Video) by Eric Clapton

Because December is at the beginning of the Southern Hemisphere summer, White Christmases there are extremely rare, except in Antarctica, in the Southern Alps of New Zealand's South Island, and in parts of the Andes in South America as well as the southern tip of the continent, in places like Ushuaia, Argentina.

The Alps are the highest and most extensive mountain range system that lies entirely in Europe, stretching approximately 1,200 kilometres across eight Alpine countries: Austria, France, Germany, Italy, Liechtenstein, Monaco, Slovenia, and Switzerland.

The South Island, also officially named Te Waipounamu, is the larger of the two major islands of New Zealand in surface area; the other being the smaller but more populous North Island.

The Andes or Andean Mountains are the longest continental mountain range in the world, forming a continuous highland along the western edge of South America.

The song, "White Christmas", written by Irving Berlin and sung by Bing Crosby and featured in the 1942 Paramount Pictures film Holiday Inn, is the best-selling single of all time and speaks nostalgically of a traditional white Christmas and has since became a seasonal standard.

Paramount Pictures Corporation is an American film studio, television production company and motion picture distributor, consistently ranked as one of the "Big Six" film studios of Hollywood.

Irving Berlin was a Russian-born American composer and lyricist, widely considered one of the greatest songwriters in American history.

Harry Lillis "Bing" Crosby, Jr. was an American singer and actor.

The opposite of a white Christmas, when there is no snow and thus the ground is bare, is traditionally known as a "green Christmas," from the color of bare grass.