Dry December weather could lead to Brown Christmas

With Christmas less than a week away, our chances of having a White Christmas are looking pretty slim. With the snowy winters the last couple of years, it seems like Christmas is always white - It's not.

This is what December 2006 in Fargo looked like. That year Christmas was brown and just like yesterday people were out enjoying the mild weather. Christmas Day had high's in the 20's but the days either side of it saw highs in the 40's. Earlier that month there had been snow but the ground was pretty much bare for the 2 weeks before Christmas.

On Christmas Eve 1999 there was an inch of snow on the ground but that was done in by a record high of 47 in Fargo and 4 days late the temperature hit 52. This year is unique in one way that those two Christmases weren't.

Daryl Ritchison – StormTRACKER Meteorologist: “You'd have to go back to 1943 to find the last truly brown Christmas in the sense that we've made it all the way through Christmas without any official snow cover.”

Rusty Papachek – West Acres General Manager: “We want good weather so people can get here.”

The number of shoppers at the mall this year is actually up. And it's not just shoppers from our area.

Rusty Papacheck: “It's Canadians that are still coming down too. In other years when it gets kind of dicey in late November or early December, we've kind of noticed that Canadian shoppers really tapered off. This year with I-29 wide open Canadians are still coming down.”

So will our hockey loving neighbors to the north be able to keep coming here?

Daryl Ritchison: “It's a fairly typical fall pattern with La Nina usually it flattens and shifts as we progress towards winter, it just hasn't this year….I'll tell you in 3 months if it did.”

Even by then if we didn't have much snow we'll still all be ready for winter to end. Right now we're on track for one of the driest Decembers ever.

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