The weather forecast for Philadelphia calls for the potential for snow and ice on Christmas Eve

The dream of a white Christmas in Philadelphia will likely remain a fantasy this year, but for people traveling on the morning of Christmas Eve, the weather could be a bit terrible.

Travelers in the Philadelphia region may experience traffic disruptions Tuesday morning due to light snow and possible freezing rain, which could leave a light layer of ice during the early commute. This wintry mix will likely arrive in the area sometime between 7 a.m. and 9 a.m. as temperatures remain below freezing before moving on around midday, said Joe DeSilva, meteorologist with the National Weather Service in Mount Holly.

But we’ll probably get off lightly.

“Ice accumulation would be minimal, maybe a few hundredths of an inch,” DeSilva said. “Snowfall, maybe up to half an inch.”

However, the weather service has issued a winter weather advisory for the Philadelphia region due to the possibility of freezing rain. DeSilva said temperatures are expected to warm to a high of around 40 degrees throughout the day, limiting the potential impact on travel as Christmas Eve festivities begin.

Wednesday – Christmas Day and the first night of Hanukkah – is expected to be even milder, with temperatures reaching highs of over 30 degrees and no snowfall or ice accumulation expected in the Philadelphia region. Conditions, the weather service said in its forecast Monday, are expected to be “favorable,” although it could be cloudy overnight.

“Overall, it looks like a pretty nice Christmas,” DeSilva said.

But no white snow, which the weather service defines as one or more inches of snow on the ground by 7 a.m. on Christmas Day. This holiday spectacle is no stranger to Philadelphia, but according to the National Centers for Environmental Information, we have about a 9% chance of seeing it in any given year.

As DeSilva put it, white Christmases in the region are “not rare, but not common.”

The Philadelphia region has not had a white Christmas since 2009. This year, just days before the holiday, a storm dumped nearly two feet of snow across the region, leaving about eight inches of snow on the ground on Santa’s big day.

And the snowfall at Christmas is even more of a distant memory. According to the weather service, as of Dec. 25, the region had not received a millimeter or more of snowfall since 2002, when about 1.1 inches of the white mass blanketed the region.

Despite Monday’s frigid weather, which brought the lowest temperatures of the season so far, the Philadelphia area is historically quite mild in December, with average high temperatures remaining around 40°C. And we typically see high temperatures above freezing on 28 of the 31 days of the month.

The rest of the week is expected to remain similarly mild, with “no significant weather” until the weekend, the weather service forecast says.