Even in sunny Los Angeles, snowflakes symbolize Christmas and winter. It snows here, what, once every 100 years? (And we’re likely to wait even longer in the future.)

Update: The day before I posted this, KCET ran an article (with a photo gallery) on the history of snow in Los Angeles. It turns out it used to snow roughly once a decade…until 1962. It hasn’t snowed on the plain since. It snows in the higher mountains just about every year, and the San Fernando Valley (higher than the coastal plain) got a snowstorm in 1989. But the LA basin? Nothing in the last 54 years. Los Angeles is about 5°F warmer than it was a century ago. Half of that can be accounted for by the urban heat island effect. The rest is atmospheric warming.

Check out the KCET article – they’ve got some amazing pictures from LA snowfalls, mostly in the 1930s and 1940s.