According to the National Weather Service in Pueblo, the chances for a White Christmas are fairly slim this year.

But a shaky Christmas, in the form of an earthquake, is not completely out of the question. It has happened before.

On Dec. 25, 1994, just after noon, a 4.0 magnitude earthquake was felt on the north end of the city, with residents reporting tremors between Colorado Springs and Castle Rock, according to the U.S. Geological Survey in Golden.

“It caused some damage, but it wasn’t extensive,” said USGS seismologist William Yeck.

“A 4.0 is pretty small. People would feel it – and it would have been pretty surprising in Colorado – but it’s not a very large earthquake in the grand scheme of things.”

The geological agency tracks and locates seismic activity across the U.S., to the tune of about 50 earthquakes a day, or roughly 20,000 per year, according to the USGS website.

Compared to highly active states like California, Hawaii and Alaska, earthquake activity in Colorado is fairly rare, Yeck said. The kind of seismic activity that causes extensive damage to homes and structures – 6.0 magnitude or greater – is extremely rare in the Centennial State.

The largest Colorado earthquake on record took place in 1882, in the northern part of the state, west of Fort Collins, officials said. It measured at 6.6 magnitude, according to USGS records, and “was felt slightly in Utah and Kansas.”

Also from the USGS archives: “In Denver, electricity was cut off after an iron bolt that connected an engine-driving pulley was broken in two at the electric power building; another bolt was bent out of shape. Buildings trembled violently and residents ran out of doors. Plaster fell and windows broke as far north as Laramie, Wyoming, and plaster fell from the ceiling of a building at the University of Colorado in Boulder. Observers also reported that the walls of the railroad depot in Louisville were cracked, that timbers cracked in a house at La Porte, and that walls of one house were cracked severely and plaster fell near Thompson, Colorado.”

The biggest recent quake in southern Colorado was a 5.3, near Trinidad, in 2011.

“In Colorado, we’re not at a tectonic plate boundary,” Yeck said. “There are faults in Colorado — there are faults literally everywhere, because a fault is really just a crack in the Earth’s crust — but we don’t have the kind of geology that would host a lot of earthquake activity.”

According to the Colorado Geological Survey’s website, there are thousands of faults in Colorado, though most of them are small. About 90 of them are potentially active.

“In southern Colorado, there are a couple of prominent faults people might be interested in,” Yeck said. “There’s the Sangre de Cristo fault, which runs along the eastern edge of the San Luis basin, and the Cheraw fault, which is near La Junta.”

If you feel the ground shaking, or if the ornaments on your Christmas tree start to bounce more than normal, it may not necessarily be an earthquake. But it might be.

“Things like sonic booms can also cause shaking, so it might not actually be an earthquake,” Yeck said. “But if you do feel like you’ve felt shaking, report it to us at usgs.gov, and we’ll look into it.”