Hey! Groundhog Day has rolled around again. Those of you reading this in Smithville will already know what happened this year!

The legend is that if the groundhog sees his shadow on Groundhog Day (always February 2nd) there will be six more weeks of winter. IF not, winter will end sooner and all who are hibernating, will be able to come out of hiding!

The groundhog officially appointed to carry out this task is named  Punxsutawney Phil, because he is kept in Young Township near Punxsutawney, Pennsylvania.

You see, the whole idea of Groundhog Day comes from German folk  lore. This superstition was brought over by the European German-speaking “Pennsylvania Dutch.” In their native lands the badger is the weather predictor, while in Hungary, it is the bear.

It is related to the lore that clear weather on the Christian festival of “Candlemas” (badger day) forebodes a prolonged winter.    

Candlemas is a Western Christian festival observed in the Roman Catholic and Lutheran churches. In folk religion, various traditional superstitions continue to be linked with the holiday, although this was discouraged by the Reformed Churches in the 16th century.

Victor Hugo, in “Les Misérables”, (1864) discusses the day as follows:

"...it was the second of February, that ancient Candlemas-day whose treacherous sun, the precursor of six weeks of cold, inspired Matthew Laensberg with the two lines, which have deservedly become classic:

'Qu'il luise ou qu'il luiserne, L'ours rentre en sa caverne.'

(Let it gleam or let it glimmer, The bear goes back into his cave.)

The observance of Groundhog Day in the United States first occurred in German communities in Pennsylvania, according to known records. The earliest mention of Groundhog Day is an entry on February 2, 1840, in the diary of James L. Morris of Morgantown, in Pennsylvania Dutch Country, according to the book on the subject by Don Yoder.

The first reported news of a Groundhog Day observance, however, was arguably made by the Punxsutawney Spirit  newspaper of Punxsutawney, Pennsylvania, in 1886.

Though meteorologists have found no direct correlation to a groundhog, badger, or any other hibernating mammal, seeing its shadow and the arrival of spring, the tradition gaily continues, and is not likely to go away.

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