December may have started off very mild, but it didn't take too long before those temperatures gave way to a real Prairie Winter by the end of the month. 

"You got pretty cold and except for one day," shared John Paul Cragg, with Environment Canada, "you were consistently below -30 starting on the 26th going all the way through January with the coldest day being the 30th. But it doesn't look like you broke any records."

"The coldest you got to was -37.2 on December 30th."

He added that December 30th was also the coldest day of the year in the southeast corner.

"So the coldest day of the year came almost at the very end of 2017."

"The southeast saw six days where temperatures dipped below -30 and an average winter for Estevan would see around ten days where temperatures dip below -30. So with those six days already racked up, you only need four more days in the winter and you'll be at the average."

He added that December actually came in slightly above average in terms of temperatures.

"And that was thanks to the really decent warm-up that started up around the 8th of December and lasted all the way until around the 18th. The southeast corner had ten days in a row that daytime highs were above zero."

Those above normal temperatures helped the average to come out slightly higher than normal despite the bitterly cold last week of the year. 

"It was such a warm string at the beginning of December and such a cold string at the end of December that together it made up for average temperatures."

As for the warm up that we are experiencing now, Cragg shared not to expect a lot of sow to go along with it.

"You could see some flurries and maybe some slight accumulation on the ground over the course of the week but not much. There's really no indication of any big precipitation event coming to the southeast until the weekend and even over the weekend, we're looking at a maximum of maybe 5 cm. And that's still very up in the air."

"Usually when we get this warming after cooling and cooling after warming trend, we see some precipitation but this time around in the southeast corner, won't be seeing anything major.