"black Christmas" meaning in English

See black Christmas in All languages combined, or Wiktionary

Noun

Audio: LL-Q1860 (eng)-Flame, not lame-black Christmas.wav Forms: black Christmases [plural]
Head templates: {{en-noun}} black Christmas (plural black Christmases)
  1. A Christmas Day or Christmas Eve in which there is no snowfall or ground covered with snow. Categories (topical): Christmas, Snow Translations (Christmas without snow): groene kerst [masculine] (Dutch), musta joulu (Finnish), Noël noir [masculine] (French), ブラッククリスマス (burakku kurisumasu) (Japanese), 블랙 크리스마스 (beullaek keuriseumaseu) (Korean), Natal preto [masculine] (Portuguese), grön jul [common-gender] (Swedish)

Inflected forms

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          "kind": "topical",
          "langcode": "en",
          "name": "Christmas",
          "orig": "en:Christmas",
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          "name": "Snow",
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          "ref": "1882, William Carew Hazlitt, English Proverbs and Proverbial Phrases: Collected from the Most Authentic Sources, Alphabetically Arranged, and Annotated, page 3:",
          "text": "D. A black Christmas makes a fat churchyard. D. This is, in effect, the same as A green winter makes, &c., as a 'black Christmas is of course a Christmas without snow.",
          "type": "quote"
        },
        {
          "ref": "1917, The Journal of Electrical Workers and Operators, page 287:",
          "text": "We didn't have any snow up here, that stayed until this year (1918) thus giving us a black Christmas, as they say, but the spirit was anything but black. Colored and white packages prevailed.",
          "type": "quote"
        },
        {
          "ref": "1928, John Van Schaick, Nature Cruisings to the Old Home Town and the Little Hill Farm:",
          "text": "We supposed that we were going to have a black Christmas, but we had snow and cold weather. The week before a storm had swept across the country to the northeastward, which just missed Albany and Boston, but […]",
          "type": "quote"
        },
        {
          "ref": "2000, Robert Hendrickson, The Facts on File Dictionary of American Regionalisms, Infobase Publishing, →ISBN, page 345:",
          "text": "“It was a black Christmas last year. It takes a white Christmas for a good crop year .” (Jesse Stuart, Beyond Dark Hills, 1938) (Snow adds nitrogen to the soil and is widely called “poor man's manure” because it fertilizes the soil, producing better crops.)",
          "type": "quote"
        },
        {
          "ref": "2017, Martin Edwards, Crimson Snow: Winter Mysteries, Sourcebooks, Inc., →ISBN:",
          "text": "... the danger to her of travelling at that particular time of the year, the weather and the holiday crowds combined, Dorothy had written. Mrs. Fairlands turned sadly from the fireplace and walked slowly to the window. A black Christmas this year, the wireless report had [forecast].",
          "type": "quote"
        }
      ],
      "glosses": [
        "A Christmas Day or Christmas Eve in which there is no snowfall or ground covered with snow."
      ],
      "id": "en-black_Christmas-en-noun-wutToxyx",
      "links": [
        [
          "Christmas Day",
          "Christmas Day"
        ],
        [
          "Christmas Eve",
          "Christmas Eve"
        ],
        [
          "snowfall",
          "snowfall"
        ],
        [
          "cover",
          "cover"
        ],
        [
          "snow",
          "snow"
        ]
      ],
      "translations": [
        {
          "code": "nl",
          "lang": "Dutch",
          "sense": "Christmas without snow",
          "tags": [
            "masculine"
          ],
          "word": "groene kerst"
        },
        {
          "code": "fi",
          "lang": "Finnish",
          "sense": "Christmas without snow",
          "word": "musta joulu"
        },
        {
          "code": "fr",
          "lang": "French",
          "sense": "Christmas without snow",
          "tags": [
            "masculine"
          ],
          "word": "Noël noir"
        },
        {
          "code": "ja",
          "lang": "Japanese",
          "roman": "burakku kurisumasu",
          "sense": "Christmas without snow",
          "word": "ブラッククリスマス"
        },
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          "code": "ko",
          "lang": "Korean",
          "roman": "beullaek keuriseumaseu",
          "sense": "Christmas without snow",
          "word": "블랙 크리스마스"
        },
        {
          "code": "pt",
          "lang": "Portuguese",
          "sense": "Christmas without snow",
          "tags": [
            "masculine"
          ],
          "word": "Natal preto"
        },
        {
          "code": "sv",
          "lang": "Swedish",
          "sense": "Christmas without snow",
          "tags": [
            "common-gender"
          ],
          "word": "grön jul"
        }
      ]
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          "ref": "1917, The Journal of Electrical Workers and Operators, page 287:",
          "text": "We didn't have any snow up here, that stayed until this year (1918) thus giving us a black Christmas, as they say, but the spirit was anything but black. Colored and white packages prevailed.",
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          "text": "We supposed that we were going to have a black Christmas, but we had snow and cold weather. The week before a storm had swept across the country to the northeastward, which just missed Albany and Boston, but […]",
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          "ref": "2000, Robert Hendrickson, The Facts on File Dictionary of American Regionalisms, Infobase Publishing, →ISBN, page 345:",
          "text": "“It was a black Christmas last year. It takes a white Christmas for a good crop year .” (Jesse Stuart, Beyond Dark Hills, 1938) (Snow adds nitrogen to the soil and is widely called “poor man's manure” because it fertilizes the soil, producing better crops.)",
          "type": "quote"
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          "ref": "2017, Martin Edwards, Crimson Snow: Winter Mysteries, Sourcebooks, Inc., →ISBN:",
          "text": "... the danger to her of travelling at that particular time of the year, the weather and the holiday crowds combined, Dorothy had written. Mrs. Fairlands turned sadly from the fireplace and walked slowly to the window. A black Christmas this year, the wireless report had [forecast].",
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        "A Christmas Day or Christmas Eve in which there is no snowfall or ground covered with snow."
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          "Christmas Day",
          "Christmas Day"
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          "Christmas Eve",
          "Christmas Eve"
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          "snowfall",
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          "cover",
          "cover"
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  "translations": [
    {
      "code": "nl",
      "lang": "Dutch",
      "sense": "Christmas without snow",
      "tags": [
        "masculine"
      ],
      "word": "groene kerst"
    },
    {
      "code": "fi",
      "lang": "Finnish",
      "sense": "Christmas without snow",
      "word": "musta joulu"
    },
    {
      "code": "fr",
      "lang": "French",
      "sense": "Christmas without snow",
      "tags": [
        "masculine"
      ],
      "word": "Noël noir"
    },
    {
      "code": "ja",
      "lang": "Japanese",
      "roman": "burakku kurisumasu",
      "sense": "Christmas without snow",
      "word": "ブラッククリスマス"
    },
    {
      "code": "ko",
      "lang": "Korean",
      "roman": "beullaek keuriseumaseu",
      "sense": "Christmas without snow",
      "word": "블랙 크리스마스"
    },
    {
      "code": "pt",
      "lang": "Portuguese",
      "sense": "Christmas without snow",
      "tags": [
        "masculine"
      ],
      "word": "Natal preto"
    },
    {
      "code": "sv",
      "lang": "Swedish",
      "sense": "Christmas without snow",
      "tags": [
        "common-gender"
      ],
      "word": "grön jul"
    }
  ],
  "word": "black Christmas"
}

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This page is a part of the kaikki.org machine-readable English dictionary. This dictionary is based on structured data extracted on 2025-01-18 from the enwiktionary dump dated 2025-01-01 using wiktextract (e4a2c88 and 4230888). The data shown on this site has been post-processed and various details (e.g., extra categories) removed, some information disambiguated, and additional data merged from other sources. See the raw data download page for the unprocessed wiktextract data.

If you use this data in academic research, please cite Tatu Ylonen: Wiktextract: Wiktionary as Machine-Readable Structured Data, Proceedings of the 13th Conference on Language Resources and Evaluation (LREC), pp. 1317-1325, Marseille, 20-25 June 2022. Linking to the relevant page(s) under https://kaikki.org would also be greatly appreciated.