A Blue Streak for Rose Parade : Tradition: Nature is expected to bestow sunny skies on the festivities for 41st year in a row.

There are, in Southern California, certain immutable “laws” that even a newcomer can recite by heart: Mudslides come in winter, autumn brings brush fires--and the sun always shines on the Rose Parade.

For as long as there has been a Rose Bowl, it seems, nature has turned Pasadena into a New Year’s Day paradise.

Only once since Franklin D. Roosevelt served as president have the heavens dumped on our festive tradition of sticking it to all those snowbound California-haters in “TV land” who will spend halftime hauling snow blowers out of the garage.

So it should come as no surprise that it’s happening again this year, for the 41st holiday season in a row: The fresh-scrubbed skies, the view of the San Gabriels, the fat, alabaster clouds--all at the height of what is supposed to be our annual time of rain.

“New Year’s Day is looking pretty good,” said meteorologist Rob Kaczmarek of WeatherData Inc. “In fact, it should be dry for the first week of the new year.”

Why do the flowered floats score such clear sailing down Colorado Boulevard? It’s a mystery even the weatherman cannot explain. “Typically, even though we’re not a wet part of the country, this is our wet season,” Kaczmarek said. “I don’t know why we’ve had such a good stretch of Rose Bowl weather.”

Others have their theories.

Tom Coston, director of the Doo-Dah Parade, the Rose Parade’s counterculture rival, can’t help but wonder whether those white-suited establishment guys at the Tournament of Roses aren’t, as usual, pulling strings.

“There have,” he says confidentially, “been reports of collusion with weather-altering technologists. Also, we suspect a Caltech link.”

Pasadena psychic Ruth Garfield chalks the good weather up to “all the positive energy from all the people participating in the parade.”

“It’s the positive vibrations flowing,” Garfield said. “The whole world is watching and looking forward to it--it’s like that saying, ‘Don’t rain on my parade.’ ”

Tournament spokesman Ken Veronda acknowledges that the festival’s winning streak has been uncanny, particularly in recent years. Not that they’re superstitious, he says, but the folks at the tournament have taken to avoiding even the mention of rain--their contingency plan for wet weather goes by the euphemism “Plan X.”

Veronda is among the minority of Pasadenans who were actually alive the last time the Tournament of Roses got wet. That was in 1955, when Ohio State defeated USC, 20-7, in the Rose Bowl, and the bands were prohibited from playing on the muddy fields at halftime. Before that, there was an 18-year dry spell dating back to 1937. All told, there have only been nine times in the history of the tournament when nature has dampened the festivities. (The other years were 1934, 1922, 1916, 1910, 1906, 1899 and 1895.)

Rain has postponed the festivities, but never forced their cancellation--not even in 1934, when a foot of rain fell in the 48 hours leading up to the parade.

If the event’s few storms were dramatic, even more so were its near-misses: years like 1982, when it rained right up until the moment the lead trumpeters stepped onto the parade route, and 1990, when a predicted storm rolled in just as the clock ran out in the fourth quarter of the Rose Bowl game.

This week began with weather as picture perfect as if giant vacuum cleaners had sucked the very smog out of the sky.

And experts say the weather will remain pleasant throughout next week, with plenty of sunshine and temperatures in the mid-70s.

“It is,” says the Doo-Dah’s Coston, “an amazing thing. And the rest of the country--what must they think? . . .

“It really must tick them off.”