The Long Way Home 2.6.26

As temperatures plunged the last few weeks, the snow didn’t stop. It just came in frequent, relatively small amounts, blown around by gusty winds. Due to my advanced years and easily frozen fingers, the only snow I moved during the lengthy cold snap was off the porch and around the car. Our driveway, better described as “park” way, is a couple of feet longer than our car and as wide as two cars side by side. While these inch-or-two snowfalls happened almost daily, I would sweep snow off the car and push it into a fast-growing snowbank where the second car, if we had one, would go. I left that growing snowbank until now, at the end of the month, when I shoveled it all. Temps were slightly above zero. 

While shoveling, my thoughts went from avoiding my demise from a cardiac disaster to contemplating the birthdays of our direct descendants. There was a reason for those thoughts that went beyond the fact they’d get zippy-doo-dah from my “estate,” if my old ticker were to give up the ghost during snow removal. That estate is as empty as a dry well.

Why did my monkey mind wander into the birthdays of four adults that are our spawn? I realized that all were born on, or almost on, very specific Days. Daughter number two was born on the anniversary of World War Two’s D-Day. Daughter number three came the Sunday after tax filing day--a day that has always made me shudder. Son number one, and only, slid out on my birthday. And our firstborn daughter arrived on--Groundhog Day. 

Historically, humans have sought "meaning" in birthdays. To me, they are only memorable because they're the day my kids were born, and I was there. My birthday, like the other 364 days, is just another day. Always fascinating to see the anniversary of certain days become overly important to some people.

Groundhog Day is a blend of ancient astronomical markers, European folklore, and 19th-century American marketing--mostly marketing, a function that has dominated our country longer, and more effectively, than any political part. It is a "cross-quarter day"— marking the midpoint between the winter solstice and the spring equinox.

Long before the groundhog, Gaelic people held a festival honoring the goddess Brigid and the first signs of spring, around February 1. They believed that if the "Cailleach" (a divine hag) wanted a long winter, she would make the day sunny so she could gather more firewood.

The Christian Church later christened this time of year Candlemas. A popular English folk rhyme captured the weather superstition: "If Candlemas be fair and bright, / Come, Winter, have another flight; / If Candlemas brings clouds and rain, / Go Winter, and come not again."

Germans observed badgers or hedgehogs on Candlemas. If the animal saw its shadow, it predicted a "second winter" (six more weeks of cold). When German immigrants settled in America in the 1700s, they found an abundance of groundhogs. Because groundhogs are also hibernating mammals, they became the new official "weather prophets." The first recorded mention of groundhogs as weather predictors on February 2 appeared in a Pennsylvania diary in 1840.

In 1886, Clymer Freas, the editor of the small town newspaper Punxsutawney Spirit, began promoting the local groundhogs as expert weather predictors. On February 2, 1887, the first official Groundhog Day celebration was held at Gobbler’s Knob in Punxsutawney, PA. In the formal proclamation for the event, editor Freas, whose huckster spirit overpowered his journalistic integrity, declared that Punxsutawney Phil was the "only" true weather-forecasting groundhog, a clever piece of marketing that eventually made the town the "Weather Capital of the World."

According to the Punxsutawney Groundhog Club, there has only ever been one Phil since 1887. They claim he lives forever by drinking a "secret elixir" every summer, which grants him an additional seven years of life per sip. 

Now, you know where the mind of a father can go. I don’t give a damn about groundhogs, but I’d like to know what is in their magic elixir.