The year before that – in 2001 – Christmas began with rain and fog overnight, followed by cloudy conditions and clearing in the evening, with a high temperature of 7.6 degrees, according to Environment Canada’s records.

Go back another year, to 2000, and Christmas Day in Yarmouth was a wintry one, with snow and blowing snow and a wind-chill that reached the minus-20-to-minus-22 range by the evening.

The Yarmouth area ended the 1990s with a white Christmas, with snow showers in the morning and snow throughout the day, according to the weather data for Dec. 25, 1999.

There is no mention of snow in the records for Christmas Day in 1998 – it was mainly clear most of the day after a cloudy overnight period – but the data for Christmas Eve indicate that the area experienced snow and snow showers on Dec. 24.

Snow is mentioned in the entry for Dec. 25, 1997, with snow and ice pellets reported to have fallen in the early afternoon, but the rest of the day consisted of rain, capped off by drizzle and fog in the late-evening hours.

There was no snow in Yarmouth at Christmas in 1996 – a rainy, foggy overnight period having been followed by cloudy conditions and then clearing – while snow showers were reported in the evening of Christmas Day 1995.

There was no white Christmas locally in 1994, but the two years prior to that were a different story, with overnight snow and snow again in the evening in ’93 and snow showers just about the whole day in ’92.

Twenty years ago, in 1987, Christmas Day dawned cloudy, with snow in the morning, followed by rain and fog.

The coldest Christmas in the Yarmouth area in The Vanguard’s 41-year history occurred in 1980, when the temperature fell steadily throughout the day, going from above freezing in the overnight hours to minus 17.9 degrees. It was a day of snow, snow showers and blowing snow, with a wind-chill reaching minus 30, according to the Environment Canada data.

Other cold Yarmouth Christmases of note include 1983 (low temperature of minus 14.1, minus 25 wind-chill, snow showers and blowing snow), 1975 (low of minus 13.9, minus 23 wind-chill, some snow but a mostly cloudy day) and 1968 (low of minus 14.4, minus 26 wind-chill, snow showers and blowing snow).