FARMINGTON – Maybe it was luck. Maybe it was a fluke. Or maybe, it was a belated Christmas present, of sorts. Whatever it was, loads of people rejoiced Tuesday as the first real snow of the winter season fell in high places all over Maine.

“It does something to people,” said Michael Jones, of Aardvark Outfitters in Farmington, on Tuesday afternoon of the snow that dusted the downtown Tuesday morning. “The irony is the second it snows, it’s … like a burst of business,” he said. “Typically Boxing Day – the day after Christmas – is always busy, but I know we’ve seen business we wouldn’t have seen just because of an inch of snow on the ground.”

By midday, there was more than an inch of snow at Sugarloaf/USA, snow reporter Ethan Austin said. Three to three and a half inches had fallen at the base of the mountain just after noon, and it had started snowing heavily again, after a brief lull. “The forecast is calling for it to snow the rest of the afternoon,” he said.

“It’s our first real snowfall for a couple of weeks, anyway,” Austin said. “It’s perfect timing. We couldn’t ask for it to come at a better time.”

The week between Christmas and New Year’s is usually a busy time at ski resorts, with holiday events like Sugarloaf’s Torchlight Parade scheduled and schoolkids on break.

But for the past few weeks, it’s been so warm out that in many places, even making snow was off-limits.

“It’s been more of a struggle trying to make snow,” Rangeley’s Saddleback Mountain Office Manager Terri Thompson said Tuesday. “Usually you have one or the other,” she said, explaining that when natural snow fails to fall, resorts can often rely on their snow guns.

“It’s been kind of an odd season,” she said. “The lakes haven’t even frozen over.” It did snow on Tuesday, though, she said, and by mid-afternoon crowds of holiday travelers were starting to arrive. “Everyone seems quite happy,” she said.

Well, not everyone. Where many ski mountains can make at least some snow on chilly nights, snowmobilers are totally reliant on Mother Nature, who has been quite stingy this Christmas.

“We need significant snow on the trails so snowmobilers can get from A to B,” Jackie Munzer, JV Wing snowmobile club treasurer said. The inch or so that fell in Carrabassett Valley on Tuesday was certainly not enough to make for good snowmobiling.

That’s downright depressing for many snowmobilers, and scary for businesses that depend on them, she said.

After last year’s low snow season, Munzer said, she worries businesses might not make it through another bad year. “If this happens again,” she said, “the poor businesses in the area are going to suffer so bad I’d be surprised if (some) didn’t go out of business.”

Tuesday’s snow disappointed members of her club, she said. “We sort of got overexcited before the weekend came because they were predicting a Nor’easter.”

The last time she can remember a winter this warm, she said, was in 1981.

“Everybody’s talking about the lack of snow,” she said. “Everybody’s down and out.”

Ski industry people, though, are a bit more optimistic. Only 41 out of 131 trails are open at Sunday River in Bethel and the two to three inches of snow Monday night and Tuesday morning didn’t open any more of them, mountain spokesman Alex Kaufman said.

But the snow did improve skiing conditions and made things whiter on the slopes, he said.

“It’s dense heavy snow, but it’s an improvement,” Kaufman said. “Whenever we are able to mix natural snow with machine-made snow, it improves the surface.”

The early season is always a challenge, he said. “We’re used to dealing with that. People ski more when it snows a lot in their back yard.”

Staff writer Rebecca Goldfine contributed to this story.