If you live in the United States and Canada, you know February 2nd is Groundhog Day…. and nothing is more Pennsylvanian than Punxsutawney Phil, the famous groundhog who comes out of his hole in Punxsutawney, PA each year to predict the start of spring. Right?
Actually, you’d be wrong. It’s ok, we were shocked too.
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On February 2, 1887, Groundhog Day, featuring a rodent meteorologist, is celebrated for the first time at Gobbler’s Knob in Punxsutawney, Pennsylvania. The event was the brainchild of local newspaper editor Clymer Freas, who sold a group of businessmen and groundhog hunters—known collectively as the Punxsutawney Groundhog Club—on the idea.
The men trekked to a site called Gobbler’s Knob, where the inaugural groundhog became the bearer of bad news when he saw his shadow.
Nowadays, the yearly festivities in Punxsutawney are presided over by a band of local dignitaries known as the Inner Circle. Its members wear top hats and conduct the official proceedings in the Pennsylvania Dutch dialect. (They supposedly speak to the groundhog in “Groundhogese.”). According to tradition, if a groundhog comes out of its hole on this day and sees its shadow, it gets scared and runs back into its burrow, predicting six more weeks of winter weather; no shadow means an early spring.
Though famously tied to Pennsylvania, the February 2nd holiday finds its roots in Celtic mythology – specifically the Irish Celtic festival, Imbolc, which traditionally marks the beginning of spring. Celebrated on February 1st and associated with the goddess of fertility, now known as St. Brigid, Imbolc marks the halfway point between the winter solstice and the spring equinox. It is a celebration of spring and the longer days ahead.
On the eve of Imbolc, Brighid (Brigid), the Celtic goddess of fertility, would pass through the land giving blessings to those who left her tributes. Brigid had the power to change the seasons from frost-bitten winter to the warmth of spring.
But another character who was present in the ancient myths of Imbolc was the Cailleach, or Witch, who could allow the winter to last for longer.
Legend has it that the Cailleach would hope February 1st would be bright and sunny, which would wake her up early and allow her to gather enough firewood to keep warm during the long winter which was still to come.
If the day was dark and gloomy, Cailleach would sleep through the day and be unable to gather more firewood– meaning the spring was on its way.
It’s already possible to see where the Groundhog Day tradition of predicting six more weeks of winter came from– but before Imbolc became Groundhog Day, it was assimilated into Christianity with Candlemas, which celebrates the purification of the Virgin Mary, and was celebrated on Feb 2nd. It’s believed that if there’s bright weather on Candlemas there will be more bad weather to come.
As Ireland let go of its Celtic pagan roots and turned to Catholicism, the country began celebrating St Brigid’s Day– still known as the first day of spring.
With this came a new legend: that to see a hedgehog on St Brigid’s Day was a good weather omen, because if the hedgehog left the den it had been sleeping in all winter, it knew that the winter was over and spring was coming.
Germanic tribes adopted the tradition as they spread and inhabited regions previously occupied by the Celts. Germans believed the weather was predicted by a badger rather than a hedgehog, but the traditions are otherwise identical.
Eventually, German emigrants to the New World brought Candlemas to Pennsylvania, but the hedgehog tradition was transposed to the behavior of a large, and apparently edible, rodent called the groundhog.
The first mention found of groundhogs predicting the weather on February 2nd is in a diary entry for that day in 1840, written by a Welsh-American storekeeper in Pennsylvania:
“Today the Germans say the groundhog comes out of his winter quarters and if he sees his shadow he returns in and remains there 40 days.”
The storekeeper describes this as a general belief of his German neighbors; it doesn’t appear to be limited to a single family or town, nor does he seem to think it is a brand-new belief. Since the belief and practice almost certainly came from Europe, and since the bulk of Pennsylvania Dutch immigration occurred between 1727 and 1775, it’s likely Groundhog Day was born in that period.
The citizens of Punxsutawney, Pennsylvania, have made their own use of the prognostic skills of the groundhog, or of “Punxsutawney Phil”, as they like to call him locally.
It began on February 2nd, 1887, and as a result, the entire town of Punxsutawney adopted the talented rodent. Now deemed the “Weather Capital of the World,” Groundhog Day in Punxsutawney is marked by great festivities and celebration.
Currently, tens of thousands of spectators attend Groundhog Day events in Punxsutawney, a borough that’s home to some 6,000 people. It was immortalized in the 1993 Bill Murray film Groundhog Day, which was actually shot in Woodstock, Illinois.
How accurate is Punxsutawney Phil? Studies by the National Climatic Data Center and the Canadian weather service have yielded a dismal success rate of around 50 percent, so we shouldn’t trade in our meteorologists yet
