What the Groundhog Inherited from Candlemas
The groundhog's shadow on February 2 descends from an older ceremony of candlelight, carried from Germany to Pennsylvania by settlers who read the sky.
A fire burns on a low hill above a town in western Pennsylvania, and the people ringed around it are stamping the cold out of their boots. It is still dark. The second of February has begun, and the crowd has come up the long slope through the snow to watch a groundhog decide the weather.
Men in tall hats and dark coats work the edge of the gathering with lanterns, keeping a path open to the small building at the center of the raised ground where the animal sleeps. The fire throws light on the faces nearest it. Breath hangs in the air. Someone has brought coffee in a thermos, and it goes around, poured into cup lids and passed shoulder to shoulder.
The ritual has a clockwork, the same every year, and the clockwork is most of the point. At the first true light the animal is brought out, held up to the crowd by its handlers, and shown the sky. If a shadow falls, the word goes out: six more weeks of winter. If the day comes up gray, the prediction is an early spring. The crowd cheers at either answer, because the answer was never the event.
Forty Days After Christmas
February 2 does not belong to the groundhog by accident. It sits at the far end of the Christmas season, forty days after the manger, and for centuries it belonged to light. The old church called the day Candlemas. On that morning the candles for the year ahead were blessed, and then carried through the church in procession — a line of small flames moving through the cold — and the light was read the way all winter light is read, as a promise. The shortest day had passed six weeks before. The daylight was measurably longer. The candles said what the calendar meant.
The weather attached itself to the ceremony quickly, the way folk practice always fastens onto the church's dates. A farmer walking home from the service watched the sky instead of the road and made his own ceremony of it. The readings hardened into a rhyme, and the rhyme crossed the Atlantic in the memory of the people who spoke it:
If Candlemas be fair and bright, winter has another flight;
if Candlemas brings clouds and rain, winter is gone and will not come again.
On the far side of the Atlantic, the creature that kept the account was a badger — in some districts a bear, in others a hedgehog, whichever survivor of the cold could be roused from the ground in February. A clear morning threw its shadow across the frost, and the animal was said to turn back for another six weeks of sleep. A gray day kept it out. That is the whole system, and the groundhog merely stepped into a role that had been waiting for it.
A Badger's American Cousin
The settlers who brought the date to America came from German-speaking country, mostly, into the woods of Pennsylvania in the eighteenth century. The neighbors called them Pennsylvania Dutch — a word with nothing to do with Holland and everything to do with Deutsch, their own name for German. They carried the old rhyme in their heads, and they carried something else: the Candlemas candle, blessed at church and brought home to be lit at moments of danger, at the bedside of the sick, at the window during summer thunder. The flame kept the force of the blessing. A house with a blessed candle on its shelf was a house with a hand on its shoulder through the dark half of the year.
In the new woods the settlers found a creature that answered the old role perfectly. There were no badgers on the ridges. But the groundhog — woodchuck, the neighbors called it, taking up an Algonquian word — burrowed low and slept through the whole of winter, and surfaced near its hole in the first weeks of February as dependable as anything with a calendar. On the morning of the second, it did what the badger had done in the old country: it came out, looked around, and met its own shadow if the sky was clear.
The farmers read the sign, or pretended to read the sign, and then they did what the sign was really for. They walked to the neighbor's place. They stood in the yard in their coats and talked about it. Somebody put a pot of coffee on. The month had handed them a reason to gather, and a reason to gather in February is a thing people hold onto.
In time the custom spread beyond the German farms in the way all good customs spread, by being worth a story. Towns across the eastern ridges turned out on the second and watched any animal with a burrow and a reputation. The groundhog's day was becoming an American calendar of its own, and it did not wait for anybody's permission.
The One Day February Offers
Every thread of it meets in one place now. Punxsutawney, Pennsylvania, has kept the account since the late nineteenth century, and its groundhog — named Phil by the people who feed him — lives at the center of the performance. The men in tall hats belong to the Inner Circle, keepers of the animal and of the fire. They do the whole morning in earnest and in joke at once, which is the only honest way to do it, and the crowd takes it the same way. A crowd that would be unthinkable at that hour on any other morning in February stands on the hill in the deep cold, stamping, talking, passing coffee along, waiting for a small animal to be lifted into the lantern light.
In 1993 a film called Groundhog Day took the date and the town's name and made of them a story about a man who wakes every morning to the same February 2. The movie put the phrase into the country's mouth all year long and made the second of February a national marker. But the movie only enlarged what was already there: an occasion, in the month with the least to offer, to be somewhere together at first light.
None of this predicts weather. A person standing on that hill in early February could get the same forecast from a glance at the sky over any back porch in the county. That is not the point, and the crowd knows it. The point is harder to name, but it has to do with the fire and the lanterns and the crowd of neighbors and strangers breathing steam into the same dark. December's gifts are spent, the spring holidays are a long way off, and February in between is plain — which is precisely why the morning matters. The second of February is the one morning the month offers on purpose, and what it offers is company.
Coming Down the Hill
When the animal finally appears, hauled out into the light and looking, as animals hauled out into the light at that hour always look, thoroughly unimpressed, the men in tall hats confer. The scroll is read. The verdict — shadow or no shadow — is given to the crowd, and the crowd roars with the particular roar of people who have stood in the cold for hours to be told what they already knew. The fire has been fed all morning. The dark has gone from black to gray to the pale of a winter day.
By the time the people pick their way down the slope, the town below is awake. Sidewalks fill, windows light up, coffee is being poured at the counters, and the talk is all of six more weeks or an early spring. The groundhog is back in its house, asleep before the sun is fully up. In the homes where the older custom survived, a blessed candle will go into the window that evening and burn at the table. And the second of February will be logged in the way it always has been — a prediction no one can check, and a gathering everyone remembers.
