On Philly’s coldest day of the year, a celebration of ice cream. It’s about to get a whole lot warmer

The coldest morning of the year couldn’t keep Emily Moore away from celebrating Ice Cream for Breakfast Day at Milk Jawn in East Passyunk.

Temperatures dropped to 15 in Philadelphia with a stinging wind making it feel as if it were in single digits — by far the most frigid morning since Christmas week — but Moore, 30, of Philadelphia, even rallied two of her friends to join her.

“I was just saying in the car that I don’t even care about ice cream that much,” said Kristen Popa, 29, one of Moore’s recruits. But she liked the concept: The idea of queuing for ice cream at a local Philly business while a renegade Arctic air mass drooped across the East like a massive icicle was oddly enticing.

“I’m in,” she said.

And they weren’t alone. A steady stream of customers huddled indoors to sample new flavors ranging from cereal milk to cinnamon roll, or return to old favorites discovered at farmers markets. Vegan and nondairy customers got to try a Cap’n Crunch-themed concoction as well.

» READ MORE: In a Philly winter expect anything

Saturday’s turnout was precisely the kind that store employees were expecting. “We thought people were going to show up,” said Joanna Jaeger, general manager at Milk Jawn, which opened its doors in August. “It’s been pretty busy here all winter.”

At the Jeni’s Splendid Ice Cream location at 19th and Chestnut, Ice Cream for Breakfast has been a staple for a few years, but manager Angie Allen was pleasantly surprised when people started lining up for ice cream — and 50 free mugs — three-quarters of an hour before the store opened for business. “We were busier than I thought we would be, for how cold it is,” she said.

Jeni’s also featured breakfast-themed ice cream flavors, like maple-soaked pancake and lavender mocha, and left out coloring pages for children. With limited seating space inside the store, “I assume everyone just kind of went out and was eating their ice cream,” Allen said.

For some parents who had braved the cold, the weather wasn’t an incidental backdrop or a slight inconvenience but precisely the reason they sought out ice cream in the first place.

» READ MORE: Forecasters were saying this was going to be a mild winter

It can be hard to think of ways to plan family outings for children in the winter, said Suzanne Cilli, as her daughters and husband collected their ice cream. Milk Jawn was just a four-block stroll from her home in South Philadelphia, and when the family saw the store’s promotional Instagram post about the event, they instantly thought, “That’s something fun we can do, getting us out for the day,” she said.

Funnily enough, that’s how the whole concept of Ice Cream for Breakfast Day even started: Florence Rappaport, a mother in Rochester, N.Y., was just trying to entertain her kids on a chilly February morning during a blizzard in 1966.

The first Saturday in February is now feted as Ice Cream for Breakfast Day.

If Ice Cream for Breakfast Day had been on Sunday this year, the trip to the store would have been a whole lot less chilling, with temperatures in the morning about 10 degrees higher. And the atmosphere is about to return to its mild winter of 2022-23 ways with highs Sunday in the mid-40s. Come Thursday, it might go up to 60, said AccuWeather meteorologist Ryan Adamson.

It was not at all clear precisely when the Philly region would have another opportunity to eat ice cream on a frigid morning.

Saturday’s cold outbreak was essentially a one-and-done, said Adamson. The low in Philly actually was a few degrees higher than forecast. To the north, records fell and below-zero readings were common. Wind chills atop Mount Washington, in New Hampshire, approached an other-planetary minus-110 degrees.

» READ MORE: Philly has its warmest January month in 91 years and just misses a snow rarity

Perhaps fitting on the eve of an ice-cream celebration day, the Northern Hemisphere was thickly layered with a frosting of snow from the U.S. Plains to Eurasia and covered all of frigid Canada. It was so cold in Quebec that Punxsutawney Phil’s groundhog counterpart froze to death before he could issue his forecast.

That snow cover acted as a refrigerant for the cold air that poured into the East, said Adamson.

But Saturday’s cold in the end around here will have turned out be a “blip,” he said, and we now return to “the winter we’re accustomed to.” Temperatures were above normal every day in January.