black Christmas

English

Noun

black Christmas (plural black Christmases)

1. A Christmas Day or Christmas Eve on which there is not any snowfall or ground covering of snow.

   Antonym: white Christmas

   • 1882, William Carew Hazlitt, English Proverbs and Proverbial Phrases: Collected from the Most Authentic Sources, Alphabetically Arranged, and Annotated, page 3:

     D. A black Christmas makes a fat churchyard. D. This is, in effect, the same as A green winter makes, &c., as a 'black Christmas is of course a Christmas without snow.

   • 1917, The Journal of Electrical Workers and Operators, page 287:

     We didn't have any snow up here, that stayed until this year (1918) thus giving us a black Christmas, as they say, but the spirit was anything but black. Colored and white packages prevailed.

   • 1928, John Van Schaick, Nature Cruisings to the Old Home Town and the Little Hill Farm:

     We supposed that we were going to have a black Christmas, but we had snow and cold weather. The week before a storm had swept across the country to the northeastward, which just missed Albany and Boston, but […]

   • 2000, Robert Hendrickson, The Facts on File Dictionary of American Regionalisms, Infobase Publishing, →ISBN, page 345:

     “It was a black Christmas last year. It takes a white Christmas for a good crop year .” (Jesse Stuart, Beyond Dark Hills, 1938) (Snow adds nitrogen to the soil and is widely called “poor man's manure” because it fertilizes the soil, producing better crops.)

   • 2017, Martin Edwards, Crimson Snow: Winter Mysteries, Sourcebooks, Inc., →ISBN:

     ... the danger to her of travelling at that particular time of the year, the weather and the holiday crowds combined, Dorothy had written. Mrs. Fairlands turned sadly from the fireplace and walked slowly to the window. A black Christmas this year, the wireless report had [forecast].

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