If you think America originated using a rodent to predict the weather, you would be wrong! The ancient Celts had a pagan festival celebrating the coming of spring called Imbolc. This evolved into the Christian festival of Candlemas on Feb. 2. It honored the presentation of Jesus at the temple in Jerusalem. Priests blessed candles which symbolized the rest of winter. The Christian festival melded with the German tradition of using badgers to predict the weather. Male badgers would come out of hibernation around the beginning of February to look for mates and then return to their burrows until March. The Germans believed that if Candlemas was sunny, you would get forty more days of winter. “Sunny” was determined by whether a badger saw its shadow. Candlemas was called Badger Day in some parts of Europe. German immigrants brought the tradition to America. In 1887, newspaper editor Clymer Freas suggested to the other members of the Punxsutawney Groundhog Club that instead of killing a groundhog in a challenging hunt, they determine the weather by seeing if it would see its shadow. They marched down to Gobbler’s Knob on Feb. 2, 1887 and the rest is weather history. They decided it would be cool to talk to the groundhog in Pennsylvania Dutch dialect which they assured listeners was “groundhogese”. I think we can all agree a copious amount of alcohol was involved in this first ceremony. In case you are interested, the groundhog did see his shadow that first time. I don’t know if that was accurate, but over the years, it has only been right about 50% of the time. This was significantly behind the 87% record of competitor Staten Island Chuck. By the way, Punxsutawney’s weatherrodent was not named Phil until 1961. Before that, Americans had to curse “that damned groundhog in Pennsylvania” for their longer winters. Now it’s more personal.
https://www.history.com/this-day-in-history/first-groundhog-day
https://www.history.com/news/groundhog-day-history-and-facts
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Groundhog_Day
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