"Santa's gonna need tires instead of runners on his sleigh this Christmas," Maureen Barron, a weather specialist in the National Weather Service office in Reno, said Thursday.
And the tires won't even need to be studded - the weather service is predicting dry, mild and sunny conditions through Monday.
Barron said the Carson City area will enjoy daytime highs from the upper 40s to the mid-50s this weekend, with overnight lows from the mid-teens to the lower 20s.
Even the Lake Tahoe area and the Sierra Nevada can't count on a white Christmas, Barron said. No precipitation is forecast there and temperatures up to 8,000 feet are expected to be only 5 degrees lower than at Carson City.
Tahoe-area ski resorts have, for the most part, not counted on storms to assure white slopes for holiday skiers.
Heavenly at South Lake Tahoe, Diamond Peak at Incline Village and Squaw Valley northwest of Tahoe all were open Thursday on bases of 6-34 inches bolstered nightly by snow making machines.
Mount Rose-Ski Tahoe was an exception. Thursday's ski report said another storm laying down at least 8 inches of snow is needed before operations open.