In defense of Groundhog Day – America’s Silliest Holiday: NPR

Punxsutawney Phil is held up by his trades for the crowd to see during the Groundhog Day ceremonies in 2018 in Punxsutawney, Pennsylvania.

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As a child growing up in Pennsylvania, there are a few state treasures you come to honor, like Tastykake’s buttscotch crimpets, a 64-pack with crayola color pencils with a sharpened on the back of the box, soft pretzels and hersheys chocolate. But no locally produced treats could touch Majesty in the state’s ultimate icon: Punxsutawney Phil.

Groundhog Day always felt so exciting to me as a kid. Although I grew up hundreds of miles from Punxsutawney, I remember I was approaching the holidays with the same bottled hope of a possible snow day. I always wanted Phil to see his shadow and we would be in for more snow, days spent outside on sleds and evenings indoors with hot chocolate. And in most of my childhood, Phil delivered with predictions of long winters – though it took me for a while, perhaps longer than others, to realize his predictions did not constitute much scientific. But I still loved the excitement of the heart of the holidays and the question: What will Punxsutawney Phil predict for the rest of the season?

I will be the first to admit that Groundhog Day is also a strange holiday (and some may itch that it is not a holiday at all). There are pomp and circumstances, the top hats and tuxedo, and the myth that there is only a Punxsutawney Phil that has made weather forecasts since the 1880s. And it definitely takes the cake for the holidays with the most rodent theme MERCH. But for all its lovely strangeness, Groundhog Day is also a rarity among American holidays.

A family participates in the Groundhog Day celebrations in Punxsutawney in 2007.

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Look at an American cultural calendar and you will find that most of our biggest holidays are in service to our national myth making. We are reminded of our independence from foreign power and the liberation of slave people. We remember our military results and fallen soldiers, and honor towering American characters like George Washington and Martin Luther King Jr.

A number of cultures and religions also leave their mark with popular celebrations of Mardi Gras, Easter, Ramadan and Christmas that dot the year. But Groundhog Day is the only popular American holiday that explicitly celebrates our relationship with nature and addiction to the season’s delicate balance.

Although many Americans observe holidays that coincide with major season changes – Halloween and Diwali near the fall of the fall; Christmas, Hanukkah and Kwanzaa close to winter solar; Easter and Easter fall near the Vernal Equinox – we rarely celebrate them as such. Even the few bourgeois holidays we have that are directly linked to nature do not draw our attention to the change of seasons. Arbor Day goes with a little fanfare or national attention. Earth Day feels less like a party and more like an annual queuing about our carbonprint. Thanksgiving serves most as an on-ramp for the shopping season before Christmas.

Around the table, Americans thank you for worthy things like friends, family and health, but few count the food on the table and the ground that gave it among the things you could thank for. And none of these holidays mark the seasonal shift in Earth’s rotation around the Sun.

How Groundhog Day is unique

Groundhog Day is different. Arrival at Midwinter, the seasonal halfway point between winter solar and spring equivalence, historians believe that Groundhog Day originates in the pre-Christian Celtic celebration of IMBOLC, later syncretized to Candlemas. Groundhog Day is a celebration of nature itself and our place in it. It invites us to participate in an old ritual, and wonder if winter will continue, or whether the thaw will come early so we can start a new cycle of planting, growth and harvest.

Changing seasons have been an important source of human celebration for millennia. Old Egyptians marked winter solver and the seasonal changes brought by the flood season. Nowruz, the new year’s celebration observed in Central Asia, has been celebrated on Spring Equinox for more than 3,000 years. Some of our most old and mysterious megalithic places, like Nabta Playa Stone Circle and Stonehenge, point to the connection between our moving planet, this year’s rhythms and lengths early people would go to exactly predict them.

In our modern American life, many of us sit a comfortable distance from the seasons. Cars carry us around in moving indoor spaces, regardless of season; Apartments and houses are equipped with electrical heating and cooling systems that protect us from nature’s toughest days. We have put more distance between the Earth that gives our food and the well -informed stores where we get it. At the beginning of our national project we were a people who stabbed our fortunes in the seasons: More than 90% of Americans were farmers. Today, this number is below 2%.

We also live in a time when the Earth is changing quickly and the seasons of North America are also changing. Spring seems to arrive early, autumn late – the growing season for crops is changing and plagued by more severe extreme weather. Human life, plant life and wildlife are intricate intertwined with the seasonal balance. The separation between our everyday life and seasons can make us comfortable, but it can also come at a price.

Groundhog -dealer John Griffiths has Punxsutawney Phil, who did not see his shadow, in 2020.

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Groundhog Day can be a reminder of this delicate balance. It is a time of year when the sky, if you see, stays easier later in the evening and the sun rises earlier in the morning. Birds begin their migration north and dawn breaks with their songs. And in a relatively unclear Pennsylvania city, a group of people who carry top hats will keep a joint in the air and try to determine if he glimpsed his shadow.

So let’s celebrate Groundhog Day, in all its bisexual, quirky strangeness. Let it remind us that we are still in the winter’s couplings and hope for a temperate spring. Let it remind us that we have not muted nature, but simply made us more comfortable in its domain. And let’s ask ourselves at this crucial turning point, what’s the front? Will it be more of the same, or are we prepared for change?