It was 14 degrees during the day on 31 Dec. 20 years ago it was unusual not to have snow for Christmas and New Year.
This is one of those widely spread Mandela effect-style misconceptions.
The chances of a white Christmas in the UK are around 10%, and depending where you are in the US [0], especially if you consider the population density not pictured in that chart, even lower.
Humans generally hugely overestimate how often a white Christmas actually happens due to selection bias.
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/White_Christmas_(weather)#/med...
Why do you assume the OP is in the UK or US? We’re discussing climate and weather in the Alps; there are plenty of places in Europe where a white Christmas really was not unusual.
To live anywhere where to quote OP "it [would be] unusual not to have snow for Christmas and New Year" would basically mean living in a skiable country itself, so I did do a lot of assuming there.
But then I don't ski. I wouldn't know if skiers take vacations around the world to see different snow.
[0] https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wei%C3%9Fe_Weihnachten_(Wetter...
Example: in my home city the winters have been getting warmer on average pretty drastically. I'm in my mid-twenties, around the time of my birth the average winter weather YoY was still cold enough to freeze the sound (not the audio one) near my home deep and hard enough anyone could walk nearly the whole width from one bank to the other. During my early childhood we had ~0.5m of snow nearly all winter but I can't remember having even a "white christmas" since I was ~14. Even this winter we had like 10-15cm of snow total, most of which melted as soon as hit the ground, a layer of ~5cm stayed for around a week a bit before christmas. The holidays themself were cold (not freezing) and it rained almost the entire time.
Which it's true, it was stupid then to take a cold snap as "climate change is fake lol", but it's also stupid now to take a warm spell as "we are doomed climate chaaange".
OP could have given a long, complex nuanced statement to appease pedants like "Due to climate change making warm weather and lack of snow in January far more likely than in the past, there was in fact warm weather and lack of snow during my planned trip, so I had to cancel my plans. The odds of this happening without decades of carbon emissions from fossil fuels would have been very unlikely".
Or, you can skip all that excessive cruft which is understood by almost everyone as being implicit and just say due to climate change.