Punxsutawney Phil, you’ve failed us again.
This winter has been a brutal one. Arctic blasts, a polar vortex, freezing winds—I can’t take it anymore. Here I was, like so many others, hoping, praying, that you somehow wouldn’t see your shadow on February 2nd and would grant us early spring. Instead, you crawled back into your burrow for another six weeks, leaving the rest of us to suffer the consequences. How naive of me to think that you—a small little groundhog—would somehow fulfill these hopes of mine.
I’ve never paid much attention to Groundhog Day before this year. But in the midst of this harsh Northeast winter and the toll it’s taking on my California self, my interest has substantially peaked. On February 2nd, after waking up to immense disappointment, I got curious: what exactly is the point of a group of men in bowler hats in rural Pennsylvania worshiping a groundhog? I decided to do some digging.
According to the official Punxsutawney Groundhog Club website, the holiday’s origins are “clouded in the mists of time.” Not very helpful. With some more research, I found out that Groundhog Day traces back to the pre-Christian seasonal festivals—part of the same cycle that gave us holidays like Halloween and May Day. These “cross-quarter” days marked transitions between seasons and were considered important to predicting weather.
In the 1700s, Germans colonized the region that is now present-day Punxsawtaney, Pennsylvania. They brought with them the holiday Candlemas, a Christian festival day on February 2 commemorating the purification of the Virgin Mary. There was also a German tradition that if an animal—initially a badger—saw its shadow on that day, more winter was predicted to come. Then in 1886, a man named Clymer H. Freas established the Punxsutawney Groundhog Club, and later proclaimed February 2 as Groundhog Day. Now nearly 140 years later, the Groundhog Day celebration attracts nearly 20,000 people annually to witness Punxsutawney Phil’s great reawakening.
While the news of six more weeks of winter was disappointing, it wasn’t exactly a surprise. The Midwest and East Coast have gotten rocked this season thanks to the polar vortex. Brutal storms, frigid temperatures, and extremely dry air all season have made this winter hard to bear. It doesn’t help that recent winters have been milder overall, making this year’s bitter conditions all the more jarring. But don’t fret, there’s still hope: moderate temperatures are expected in the coming weeks! At this point, I’ll gladly take 35º over 15º… that’s how desperate I’ve become.
I think Groundhog Day is the ultimate novelty American holiday. Think about it, we’ve created a national holiday on the loosest basis of religion, all to make a spectacle of a ground rodent and its non-existent weather predicting powers. Feels pretty quintessentially American to me. After almost a century and a half of annual celebration, thousands of people still get out to Western Pennsylvania just to see what Phil decides. I have to admit, the truth hurts—but for now, stay warm and hopeful. Spring can’t come soon enough!