DENVER — If you were to take a poll of anyone who's spent, say, five years or longer in Denver, you'd probably get a whole bunch of different replies to the following question.
Which major winter(ish) holiday is Denver's snowiest?
For the sake of simplicity, we're talking about three specific holidays: Halloween, Thanksgiving and Christmas.
So let's take a look at each holiday and figure out which one takes the crown as Denver's snowiest.
Halloween
Snow on Halloween might sound weird in a lot of places, but not in Denver. The city has a history of crippling snowstorms around the spooky holiday, though Halloween snow, based on statistics, is a bit more of a myth than a reality.
Only about 13% of the last 30 Halloweens have featured snow either falling or on the ground of Oct. 31.
That said, a big pre-Halloween snowstorm in 2019 dropped nearly a foot of snow over four days in Denver, probably boosting our anecdotal feelings about a snowy Halloween.
Thanksgiving
If it can snow on Halloween, it can snow on Thanksgiving, too. Right?
Well, it certainly has and can snow on Thanksgiving, but believe it or not, Thanksgiving is actually slightly less snowy than Halloween, at least in Denver.
Only 12% of Thanksgivings have had snow falling on the day of the holiday, a slightly lower percentage than Halloween (13%).
However, eight of the past 30 Thanksgivings (including both 2019 and 2020) have had snow on the ground on Thanksgiving Day. That's 27% of the time or slightly more than a quarter of the past 30 Thanksgivings.
Christmas
Then, there's Christmas.
As you might expect, Christmas is actually the snowiest of the three major year-end holidays, with snow on the ground about two in five times.
So while anecdotal recent examples might lead us to believe that Thanksgiving or Halloween are snowier than Christmas, it's clear that Christmas is actually Denver's snowiest holiday.
That's based on both snow falling on the day of the holiday and snow on the ground of the holiday.
The answer
So if you've read this far, you probably already know the answer: it's Christmas, and frankly, it isn't even close.
That said, Colorado weather is known for doing weird things at weird times, so you'd be forgiven for thinking otherwise.
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