TORONTO - Dreams of a white Christmas became a reality Thursday pretty well across Canada.

Environment Canada had been predicting the first cross-country white Christmas since 1971 after several storms battered most of Canada in the week leading up to the holiday.

While the national weather forecasting agency didn't make an official declaration on whether snow had indeed blanketed Canada from coast to coast, many of its regional offices reported snow on the ground for Christmas.

"We're covered. Definitely a white Christmas here," Environment Canada meteorologist John McIntyre said from Vancouver.

At the Vancouver airport, where many travellers were stranded because of the weather, 27 centimetres of snow fell on Christmas Eve, setting a weather record.

"It's the greatest (amount of) snow on the ground for Christmas ever," said McIntyre.

Snow blanketed pretty well all of Ontario, said Environment Canada meteorologist Ria Alsen in Toronto.

The only question mark in Canada's most populous province was in the southern city of Windsor, where only trace amounts of snow were recorded at the airport, Alsen said.

Technically, it might not be a white Christmas, however Alsen says web cameras showed there was more of the white stuff on the ground in other parts of Windsor.

"We're thinking, well, it's probably pretty close to being a white Christmas," she said.

"We should be white everywhere. The province has been cold and we've had snow over the last week, so that keeps us nice and white."

In neighbouring Quebec, the weather agency had issued wind and snow warnings for small pockets of the province. Montreal received a dump of 20 centimetres of snow earlier in the week and while rain threatened to wash it away, there was still some on the ground for Christmas.

For the Maritime provinces, the question of whether it was truly a white Christmas might come down to timing. In most places there was snow on the ground for Christmas Eve.

"Last night in most of the areas, the ground was white. But by this afternoon, most of it had melted," Stephen Hatt, a meteorologist with Environment Canada, said Thursday from Dartmouth, Nova Scotia.

The exception?

"Northern New Brunswick certainly has a lot of snow still," Hatt said.

"They get a lot of snow most winters."

Residents in St. John's, N.L. woke up to snow on the ground, although with a daytime high of 10 C it wasn't expected to last.

"It was officially a white Christmas, but rapidly disappearing," said Dermott Kearney, an Environment Canada meterologist in Gander, N.L.

It was a mixed bag of weather. The province's southern coast received between 22 and 30 millimetres of rain while other regions saw a variety of weather warnings, from heavy snowfalls, blizzards and powerful winds to hazardous wind chills.

Back on Canada's other coast, residents were bracing for more snow.

Environment Canada issued Boxing Day snowfall warnings for parts of British Columbia, including the metro Vancouver area, the Sunshine Coast and the eastern half of Vancouver Island.

"There's a warm front coming in from the west that's going to bring more precipitation, and unfortunately it's going to start as snow," said Environment Canada's McIntyre from Vancouver.

Most of Canada was hit with winter storms in the week leading up to Christmas.

Even normally balmy Victoria at one point saw 41 centimetres of snow -- more than any other major Canadian city.

In southern Ontario, the snow has stuck around since Dec.17, the first of three major storms that were dubbed "snowmaggedon" by Environment Canada.