Presentation of Christ (AKA Candlemas AKA Groundhog Day) - Part 4: The Groundhog

This bit about the Groundhog has taken the most time for two reasons: A lot has been written and most of it is speculative. Nevertheless, here are the facts I am comfortable lableing as such.

1. The Groundhog coming out of its hole is derived from a pre-Christian germanic belief that bears came out of their dens on February 2nd for exactly the same reason groundhogs come out of their burrows on Feb 2nd: To check on the weather.

2. The coincidence of the Feast of the Presentation and the pagan weather prediction celebration are exactly that, coincidental. Some modern pagans and anti-Roman Catholic polemicists have tried to claim that the date of the Christian feast was chosen to deliberatly supplant the pagan ritual, and that the candles/light emphasis arose out of the pagan customs. But I think history shows that is not true. For onething, the hibernating animal weather prediction aspectofthe day did not exist in the East where the Presentation Feast was first celebrated. Additionally, I think that the fidelity to having the Feast of the Presentation fall on the 40th day after the Nativity of our Lord is sufficient explanation for the February 2 date, besides, with every single day of the Christian year commemorating something or someone it is impossible for the Christian calendar not to have overlap with the pagan calendar.

3. Without dogmatizing the weather predicting activities of the day it seems that the Church in the west (which was still Orthodox) simply did what we always do, adopt whatever pagan practices are not in comflict with the Gospel and use them as evangelism tools. This is exactly what St. Pope Gregory told missionaries to do. It is what St. Paul did at at Mars Hill with the altar to the unknown god. It is what the missionaries in Alaska did with totem poles and spirit houses. Thus we have the western European poems about light, weather and Candlemas.

So what happened in the United States? Why do so many peopleknow about Ground hog day but not about the Feast of the Presentation? Well, it seems the Pennsylvanians dropped the ball. And the earliest written reference to the ground hog is in the diary of James Morris of Morgantown, Penn.

February 4, 1841 — "...Last Tuesday, the 2nd, was Candlemas day, the day on which, according to the Germans, the Groundhog peeps out of his winter quarters and if he sees his shadow he pops back for another six weeks nap, but if the day be cloudy he remains out, as the weather is to be moderate." And that might have been all there was to the groundhog tradition if it had not been for men of commerce who decided to try and to some money off of this folk custom, similar to the way the New York Hisorical Society and the New York advertising industry did with Christmas.

The first "official" Groundhog Day was February 2nd, 1886; proclaimed such in the newspaper The Punxsutawney Spirit: "Today is groundhog day and up to the time of going to press the beast has not seen its shadow." It is this newspaper that named the groundhog Punxsutawney Phil. (Interestingly, a group of strangly dressed men in the eastern part of pennsylvania claims to have been first , but their first year of celebration was in 1908.)

So has has Groundhog Day boosted commerce? It has in Punxsutawney: in 1997 (the only year for which I could find a number) more than 30,000 people went there to watch Phil come out of his hole.

Happy Feast Day! And if you go to church today, please, light a candle for my family.