The storm that had a chance at bringing snow to the Northeast over Christmas weekend will escape out to sea playing the part of the Charles Dickens’ character Ebenezer Scrooge.

Competition between a storm dropping southward from Canada and advancing cold air will fling the “Ebenezer Storm” off the Atlantic coast long before it evolves into a major snowstorm.

Millions will be waking up Christmas morning, looking out the window and quoting a brief line said by the animated explorer character Yukon Cornelius, “Nothin’!”

The advancing cold air and the northern storm will work hard to produce some lake-effect snow and perhaps some more distant snow showers. However, relying on this type of a pattern to put snow down in your backyard is risky unless you live in the Erie and Ontario snow belts.

If you are determined to get heavy snow from this particular storm, pack your bags and head to Nova Scotia or Newfoundland. It seems this storm will gel over the Atlantic and is likely to boomerang into part of the two Canada provinces. Perhaps this storm will become their Boxing Day Blizzard of 2012.

We still have some snow coming tonight into Friday morning from the twin tiers of New York and Pennsylvania to central New England. With temperatures chilling down, there’s a decent chance that some of that snow will lay around until Christmas morning. However, for the I-95 mid-Atlantic and southeastern New England: no snowballs.

The storm AccuWeather.com meteorologists have been tracking since over the northern Pacific Ocean days ago has slammed Colorado with heavy, wind-whipped snow at midweek.

The storm hasn’t exactly been Father Christmas for the Southwest. It is the second storm in less than a week resulting in major travel and shipping disruptions for roughly the same part of the nation.

While the storm will dive southward to gather Gulf of Mexico moisture at the end of the week, it will fail to cut far enough to the north along the Atlantic coast to bring a large area of heavy snow on Christmas Day. At least Ebenezer will give the gift of rain for a large part of Texas Saturday.

It appears that while there is still an outside chance of wet snow mixing in on the northern edge of the rain area Christmas Day in the southern mid-Atlantic, odds favor it being too warm in that sector for snow anyway.

Humbug!