COEUR d’ALENE — Five percent kicked 95 percent’s tail.

The white Christmas that was almost a dead certainty for Coeur d’Alene ended up being dead in the water instead. That’s water as in “not snow.”

“We had snow all day long here on Player Drive but it didn’t stick; it was 35 degrees out,” a fairly frustrated Press climatologist Cliff Harris said in the soggy aftermath Thursday. “It was really snowing hard at 2 o’clock in the morning — but it was too warm to stick.”

In his defense, Harris noted that it wasn’t a complete brownout throughout Kootenai County.

“Everything above 2,500 feet got a white Christmas,” he said. “Down here, it melted.”

The only thing that’s really been predictable in 2019, he said, is the nature of nature’s unpredictability. For example, with the area’s snows in September and October, he said we were encountering our earliest winter since local records were kept in 1895.

And with almost no snow since October? “Now we’re having our earliest spring ever,” Harris said.

But that will change, the venerable weather watcher wagered.

After some spotty snow over the next week or so, Harris said he believes “the first big snow” will arrive somewhere in the Jan. 9-13 window. But given the uncertainty that’s plagued forecasters thus far, he was guaranteeing only one thing:

His review of the wacky weather of 2019 will be published in The Press on Monday, Jan. 6. Who knows? You might have to wrestle a tornado for your newspaper.