When I arrived at the Stratford Festival in Ontario this year, there was snow on the ground and wreaths on the doors.

But it wasn’t because of premature Canadian frost and exuberant holiday cheer. No, a Christmas movie was being filmed in the lovely town that boasts exceptional Shakespeare stagings, modern plays and musicals about 90 minutes from Toronto.

“Merry Christmas!,” a restaurant server greeted me with. Oh, Canada.

During this unusually long season at the 72-year-old theatrical institution, though, audiences will likely witness some actual flurries eventually.

The venerable festival’s revival of “Annie” plays well into December — one of spring-and-summer Stratford’s longest runs ever. So the sun will come out tomorrow, albeit for fewer hours.

Directed by Donna Feore, Stratford’s queen of musicals, the jaunty production that runs till Dec. 14 finds a winning balance of nostalgia and novelty.

Today’s kids continue to have a hankering for go-get-em Annie (a guileless Harper Rae Asch) and her hard-knock life, but they have no clue it ever was a comic strip. Or, for that matter, what a comic strip even is. Every revival has to contend with the fact that the rags-to-riches plot, more outlandish by the year, is foundationally two-dimensional.

Feore’s likable version smartly straddles a comfortable middle ground.

The often cartoony costumes and wigs are more realistic and worn-out; less cherry Starburst.

Yet it’s importantly not as glum as some recent revivals of Charles Strouse, Thomas Meehan and Martin Charnin’s show have been. How can it be? With Macy’s Parade-balloon-sized characters like the evil Miss Hannigan — played with last-call bitterness by Laura Condlin — Daddy Warbucks (master of disguise, Dan Chameroy) and a deus ex machina in the form of Franklin Delano Roosevelt, you can’t very well treat wholesome “Annie” like it’s “Anna Karenina.”