Why Snow on Christmas Is Rare in Amarillo

One of the hardest things about Amarillo is predicting the weather. We see it all. We even joke that we can get all four seasons in one day. It's a joke that is built on reality. The weather here in the Texas Panhandle is crazy.

We can see extreme heat, extreme cold, there can be a lot of rain, or none at all. In the winter, we can get a snow dump that lasts for days or none at all. The highs and lows of the yearly temperatures can really leave it as a guessing game: will we have a white Christmas or not?

As an FYI, the odds are not great. Historically, the National Weather Service has said that Amarillo has only seen a white Christmas, which means an inch or two of snow on the ground on December 25th, about 9 or 10 percent of the time. Those are not very good odds.

Those records have been kept since 1892, with the news most kids don't want to hear about Christmas morning. They want to run outside after opening presents and have a great winter Christmas morning snowball fight, or make a snowman. It doesn't happen very often.

The last true white Christmas in Amarillo was in 2012, when the city officially recorded two inches of snow on the ground. I remember that morning. I remember watching it fall. I remember thinking what a picture-perfect morning.

That was twelve years ago, and longtime residents still remember it like it was yesterday. I could have sworn that really wasn't that long ago. But it was, and before that, white Christmases sprinkled through the decades, often thanks to fast-moving Canadian Clippers — those quick, bitter cold fronts that can drop the temperature 20 degrees in an hour.

December in Amarillo typically brings highs in the 40s and 50s, lows in the 20s, and around three to four inches of snow for the whole month. Most of it comes in one burst, not spread out over days. And as any Amarilloan knows, even a dusting becomes “horizontal snow” once the wind grabs it. Oh, and how the wind loves to do that.

So, will this be the year we finally see a snowy Christmas morning again? Time will tell. But if there’s one thing you can predict about Amarillo weather, it’s that it’s never predictable.