Dads

Besides being an amusing movie with Bill Murray as well as my Dad's birthday, Groundhog Day happens to be an actual day steeped in tradition. It is associated with this Scottish poem :

If Candlemas be fair and bright,
Winter has another flight.
If Candlemas brings clouds and rain,
Winter will not come again.

Ergo, sunny=shadows=more winter and cloudy=no shadows=no more winter (kind of like "April showers bring May flowers" sort of wishful thinking I guess). "Candlemas" being the day half way between the first day of winter and the first day of spring (one of the four cross quarters of the year) and commemorates the ritual purification of Mary, 40 days after the birth of Jesus. Oh those wacky Christians and their appropriation of pagan feast days. Of course, weather-wise this really only works if you live in a place in which actual winter weather is halfway done in February. I'm not bitter.

Anyway, this is linked to the belief that hibernating creatures can predict the coming of spring. The original German immigrants who brought the tradition to America in the 18th century weren't about the groundhog though. Europeans would have kept their eyes on badgers, bears, hedgehogs, or the like (anything that hibernates). The idea being that the emergence of hibernating animals signals the arrival of spring. Duh!

So we mash those two ideas together a hit frape on the blender of old European folk wisdom and the omnipresent human desire to control/predict the uncontrollable/unpredictable and voila! Groundhog Day!

Oh wait! But why groundhogs? Well, I don't know ummm...maybe a groundhog saved the president from being eaten by rabid hedgehogs. I think it's because they are small enough that they can be easily handled (not like badgers or bears) and they are solitary and relatively sluggish and they are big enough that they are easy to see in a small crowd.

True stories of groundhogs:

One time when I was excavating I ended up isolating a big groundhog in a unit and when I realized he was in there I shovel shaved around him until he was hunkered in a 25x25cm chunk of dirt. His butt was hanging out but he didn't seem to care too much until I scooped the dirt that was covering him off. Then he made a kind of annoyed grunt and got up and waddled across the excavation straight to a burrow on the other side and went in. Hilarious! Man I wish I had had a camera!

Funfacts to learn and know:

The groundhog (a.k.a. woodchuck, a.k.a "whistle pig"), Marmota monax, is in the family Sciuridae which includes squirrels, chipmunks, marmots, and prairie dogs. It lives in most of Canada and the eastern United States except for Florida (Florida! That's America's wang!). Adult proportions range from 415 to 675 mm long and roughly 3 to 4 kg.





p.s. Here is a recipe for fried woodchuck. Mmmmm woodchuck.




p.p.s. Hey wait this post is supposed to be "Groundhogs" and the other post is supposed to be "Dads". Dang it!