I never have dreamed of a white Christmas. When you grow up in Los Angeles, that just isn’t in the cards. This Christmas Day in Southern California was sunny and mild, as expected. So, imagine my astonishment at about 3:15 on the morning of New Year’s Eve when snow started falling in Temecula, Calif.

My mother and father retired in the mid 1990s. They left west L.A. and moved here in 1997. Temecula is about 90 minutes south of Los Angeles, an hour north of San Diego, and due east of Laguna Beach. It’s a high-desert suburb of about 105,000 in what now is called the Inland Empire. Modest, rolling hills couldn’t be better for pleasant, slightly challenging bicycle rides. Three different multiplexes feature 31 large movie screens, none more than seven minutes away by car or 20 minutes by bike. Decent restaurants are everywhere. Parking is abundant.

Temecula can hit 95 to 100 degrees in the summer by day. A dry breeze mercifully cools things down to about 60 at night. This time of year usually offers high temperatures in the 60s or 70s and lows in the 40s or high 30s.

Late Tuesday night saw heavy rains pierce a dull sky and 36-degree winds.

“Four more degrees, and it’ll snow,” I told my dad.

“Four fewer degrees, but I know what you mean,” he replied.

“That’s right,” I said. “Four more degrees lower.”

We ate dinner around midnight and then dozed off after a severe attack of food coma — typical behavior in the Murdock household.

About 3:15 a.m., my sister knocked my bedroom door (AKA the guest room, when I am away).

“Wake up, Deroy!” she said in amazement. “It’s snowing!”

Sure enough, down came the white stuff. It was all over my parents’ house, their palm trees, and my rental car. It was a beautiful, magical sight, and the first snow I ever have seen fall anywhere in Southern California — other than at local ski slopes — in my 51 years of growing up and then visiting here.

Enough snow fell to cover the Dish TV satellite receiver on the roof. This yielded a “No Signal” message that was the only thing on the tube until mid-morning on New Year’s Eve.

This was no blizzard, to be sure. The snowfall might have totaled an inch. But it stuck around until that afternoon day and endured into the next day in a few shady spots. There was enough of it on the ground for my sister to build a snow lady in the back yard. She christened her Miss Temecula Winters.

The nearby foothills still are white, two days later. This is a stunning vista. At least at that elevation, this usually toasty locale looks like a town in the high Sierras. A neighbor told me that he actually went sledding in those hills the other day.

And the cold temperatures persist. As I write these words, it’s 27 degrees outside.

The storm that blew through here went on to freeze fountains in Las Vegas and then blanket the Grand Canyon with snow.

The next time that Obama bellows about the gathering gloom of so-called “global warming,” I will think back and laugh with Miss Temecula Winters.