No snow show: It's been nearly 20 years since Edmonton saw a brown Christmas

If you had visions of Christmas in Edmonton with a blanket of snow beautifully covering the landscape, you may want to make other plans because YEG is due for a brown Christmas in 2023.

With all the warmth we’ve had this month, it got us thinking: what will this year’s holiday season look like in Edmonton, and how does it stack up to previous years?

We reached out to the experts at Environment and Climate Change Canada (ECCC), and not only did we get a peek at the forecast for Christmas, but they also combed through the data to give us the details on the wacky weather Edmonton has seen on past December 25ths.

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Christmas Day records

ECCC looked back at 30 years of data and found that Edmonton’s snowiest Christmas occurred on December 25, 1996, when 36 cm of snow covered the city. Imagine driving to family dinner in that!

With absolutely no snow on the ground to record, the last brown Christmas occurred in Edmonton in 2005.

And while this year certainly feels warm, it likely won’t break any records. The warmest Christmas in YEG was on December 25, 1987, when temperatures reached 8.9°C.

“Most of the ’80s were actually above zero [on Christmas],” said Alysa Pederson, a warning preparedness meteorologist with ECCC.

The coldest Christmas? That was in 1917, when the daytime high on Christmas Day was an ice-cold -28.9°C.

Christmas 2023

On Monday, December 25, temperatures in the Edmonton area will be similar to what the city has been experiencing this week, according to Pederson.

And as we have seen for much of this month, there is no snow in the forecast for Edmonton and central Alberta on Christmas, either.

ECCC

“By Sunday and then into Christmas Day on Monday, temperatures will drop a bit; they’ll be closer to -5°C to 0°C — somewhere in there,” Pederson said.

It’ll be a far cry from what we had on Christmas last year, when 28 cm of snow was on the ground, with a daytime high of -12°C. We all remember how frosty that was!

Although winter has been noticeably mild, Pederson mentioned that it’s not uncommon for the daily high temperature to hover around the zero mark on Christmas Day in Edmonton.

“Typically, our average high going back for Christmas Day for our entire period of record, which goes back to 1880, would be -6.9°C,” she said.

So, there you have it! While it’s been an oddly mild winter so far, this Christmas likely won’t be one for the weather books.