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On TV, unless a show is in a tropical setting, it almost always snows in winter. That's how you can tell it's winter. If characters aren't walking outside through falling snow, there's at least several inches on the ground.
As an obvious corollary, Christmas is always a Currier-and-Ives picture-postcard affair with miles of undisturbed snowy hills and dales, with nary a tire track or puddle of grey, muddy slush in sight.
In either case the "snow" usually looks more like shredded potatoes or soap flakes than actual snow. It never melts when it lands on someone's hair or face, to boot. And, most glaringly, the stuff isn't cold. It's never accompanied by icy roads, slushy rain or freezing winds either.
Usually, there wasn't snow in last week's episode, and there won't be any next week, either.
This will most likely be the case if your writers are from California. See also Let There Be Snow, for when this happens when it is set in a tropical setting.
BTW, if you're looking for the film, go here.
Examples
Advertising
- It barely ever snows in Ireland, still less at Christmas but Guinness brought out this optimistic ad anyway.
- Forget the snow, where the hell did that fox come from?
Anime and Manga
Film
- In the Western film The Proposition Christmas is used quite centrally, but there is no snow, because they're in the Australian Outback. Emma Watson gets a bunch of cotton and pretends it's snow.
- Babe has a similar issue, set as it is in New South Wales.
- Except when the characters are talking.
- No one in the film version of Bridget Jones even remarks on the toothrottingly quaint white Christmas happening around them even though this almost never happens in Southern England. And the film ends with Bridget kissing Darcy in a prettily snow-covered street in London.
- Subverted in the film White Christmas.
Literature
- Played with (alongside many, many other Christmas tropes) in the Discworld novel Hogfather. In the middle of Hogswatchnight (specifically, in the alternate time-dimension used by the Hogfather to travel the Disc in a single night), the usually muddy streets of Ankh-Morpork are covered in pristine white snow, but it's acknowledged that by morning this will look more like coffee meringue.
- In the novel Good Omens, by Terry Pratchett and Neil Gaiman, the unconscious shaping of his world by Adam Young means that his home town of Tadfield has the sort of weather he thinks it ought to have: "It never rained on Bonfire Night and always snowed on Christmas Eve".
Live Action TV
- Just about any Christmas Special.
- Naturally there's a Buffy example: the episode "Amends" features a Christmas snowfall in Sunnydale, California. It's a miracle. Literally.
- Adding to the surreal level of "ooh isn't that pretty"-ness in ''Gilmore Girls', it snows every winter just in time for the Loreleis to take a stroll.
- Subverted in Doctor Who, "The Christmas Invasion". At the end, after the aliens are defeated on Christmas Day, snow starts falling amid a meteor shower. Then the Doctor mentions that it's not snow, it's ash — the alien spaceship burning up in the atmosphere.
- In the following year's Christmas Episode, "The Runaway Bride", the Doctor uses the TARDIS' previously-unseen powers of weather control to create a small snowfall on demand.
- And in the year after this it was water from the ballast tanks of the Titanic(the spaceship version).
- In "Planet of the Ood" (an ice-planet) he exclaims loudly and full of joy "Finally, proper snow!". This is ofcourse a normal episode and not a Christmas special.
- M*A*S*H features one infamous example, when they are all in the mess tent celebrating, and than it starts snowing and they stare out the windows in amazement.
- Averted in an equally Did Not Do The Research way in Greek. Chapter 2 begins with "spring" semester (January; those of us who live in the Northeast love how it's called Spring Semester despite starting in what is usually the very worst part of winter)). In Ohio. Without a flake of snow in sight.
- Truth In Television — I live in Columbus. This past January was the first January in years where we had snow.
- Point is, Hollywood doesn't seem to get the ridiculous -er- variety of weather we can get.
- It also depends on where it is in Ohio. In Cleveland, it generally snows before Halloween and the ground is under a blanket before December first.
- An episode of Third Watch's fourth season had a very heavy snowstorm hit New York (although not at Christmas), and Faith Yokas' daughter Emily was trapped in a car. The squads find her, get her to hospital, and the episode ends. The next episode begins on the next morning - and there's no sign of any snowstorm whatsoever.
- Played with in the first-season Christmas episode of Veronica Mars; to create a feeling like this, the hosts of the big party have set up a snow machine outside, along with carolers. (Of course, this being Veronica Mars, the husband then gets stabbed by the woman he cheated on his wife with, for sleeping with a third woman that night, at the big Halloween party, when he was about to try cheating on his wife with a fourth woman. Ta-daaa. Veronica, narrating, says to herself, "No, Veronica, there is no Santa Claus.")
- Semi-subverted in Roswell, where Isabel at one point makes it snow in New Mexico for her brother's benefit.
- Played straight in a Christmas episode of My So-Called Life - Angela and her mother stand in the falling snow outside a church.
- Naturally doesn't happen in the Christmas episode of Bottom, leaving Richie to wonder 'Why doesn't it ever snow? You can't build a drizzle man can you? Or play drizzle balls?'
- Subverted in the Drake and Josh Christmas special, where at the end it LOOKS like it's the whole "miracle snowfall in San Diego" scenario but ends up being hard cheese shredded by a maniac and his beloved wood-chipper. On a related note, this is a revision of the original plan by Drake and Josh to make snow by putting ice in the wood-chipper, which instead caused hundreds of dollars of property damage in what was basically a frozen drive-by.
Music
- The rarely-heard verse to the Irving Berlin song the trope is named for reveals the reason the singer is "dreaming of a white Christmas": he's in Beverly Hills.
- A popular carol by the country group Alabama has the line "It's Christmas in Dixie/It's snowing in the pines." It NEVER snows regularly anywhere in Dixie! Especially in December.
Western Animation
- An exception is the Rockos Modern Life Christmas Special, where O-Town hasn't had a white Christmas in years, until Rocko and a young elf bring Christmas cheer back to the town.
- The Simpsons subverted this in one episode when Bart, expecting a snow day from a blizzard the previous night, walks outside to find "unseasonable warmth". Also subverted in an episode where the Simpsons travel to Australia during the winter in America. Homer, having taken snow skis, is disappointed to be told by Lisa that it's actually summer in Australia.
- Spoofed in an episode of Hey Arnold. The first half of the show (each entire episode holds 2 different stories) is about a very bad heat wave over the city that renders almost everyone crazy from the high temperature. At the end of that story, a single snowflake can be seen floating down from above. Part 2 of the episode, a different story, is about how the town is suddenly blanketed with a thick sheet of snow.
- On Rugrats, in an early episode a California flag is seen outside the local post office, making you assume that's where the show is set. In the Christmas episode the families rent a cabin in the mountains, so they can have "a real White Christmas". But then, a later episode involves a blizzard happening at the characters' home.
- In a related incident, in one episode we get a changing seasons montage, including snow, only to find out it's only been a week. As one character comments: "Crazy Weather we've been having, eh?"
- This New England troper's favorite example of how darn pervasive this is comes from the obscure animated Cabbage Patch Kids Christmas Special. The Kids take one step outside their magical Cabbage Patch (where It's Always Summer) and find themselves in waist-deep snow in a picturesque White Pine forest that might as well be North Conway, New Hampshire. Then they take a ride to "The City" and find an equally picturesque setting with people in furry coats and old brick buildings frosted with ice and snow and such. The thing is, according to a small sign in a park, the city in question is Atlanta, Georgia.
TroperTales
- This troper had a university friend who came up to Canada from the tropics. She talked rapturously about how as a child she'd dreamed of spending Christmas somewhere properly cold and festive-looking, and how she couldn't wait for it to snow. Then it did, and she hated it as heartily as everyone else when she found out that instead of soft flakes falling gently from the sky like angel feathers to blanket the trees, it was more usually a stinging, icy powder, blown into your face by a howling wind, that was not only unsuitable for building snowmen - too dry to pack - but needed to be shovelled.
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