Groundhog Day

I just feel moved to expound on the subject of Groundhog Day, noting that today is indeed the Feast of the Purification, a/k/a Candlemas Day a/k/a Groundhog Day.  But long-time bloggers,  like old-timers in general, find themselves apt to tell the same story over and over.

In fact, a perusal of my archives reveals that I've already discussed the subject.  Twice, in fact, in 2009 -- at the beginning and at the end of the six-week prescriptive period of additional winter.  And in 2010, I added a macabre touch to the day, publishing a recipe for Groundhog Stew.

What can I add to our annual celebration of the rites of Marmota monax that I haven't mentioned before?  A little poetry, perhaps?  Recall that a groundhog is also known, depending on whence you hale, as a woodchuck:

How much wood would a woodchuck chuck
if a woodchuck could chuck wood?

A woodchuck would chuck all the wood he could

if a woodchuck could chuck wood!

There you go, readers.  You get rhyme, alliteration, homonyms, and scientific knowledge all in one fell quatrain.

Recall -- by the way -- that groundhogs not only go about their business under the name of woodchuck, but also use the varied monikers of whistler, thickwood badger, Canada marmot, monax, moonack, weenusk, and red monk. 

Long before anyone began badgering (!) the benighted woodchuck each year at this time, his powers of prognostication were attributed to mere forces of nature.  From pre-groundhog England we have the verse:

If Candlemas be fair and bright,
Winter has another flight.
If Candlemas brings clouds and rain,
Winter will not come again.

From Germany (in translation):

For as the sun shines on Candlemas Day,
So far will the snow swirl until May.
For as the snow blows on Candlemas Day,
So far will the sun shine before May.

Et cetera, et cetera, et cetera.

Today was sunny and bright.  Any Seattle groundhog who popped his head above ground definitely saw his shadow, foreshadowing six more weeks of winter.  Alas!

But hark!  There are no groundhogs in the State of Washington!  They live and thrive east of the Mississippi and northwards into Canada.  But not in these parts.  We do have their distant marmot relatives: the hoary marmot, the yellow-bellied marmot, and the Olympic marmot.  But no one would mistake these friendly, intelligent and generally magnificent mountain animals with the common groundhog.  Our mountain marmots are far superior to that peculiar beast held aloft by the mayor of Punxsutawney, Pennsylvania, in the movie Groundhog Day. 

Having no resident groundhogs, and clearly not being physically attached to England or Germany, we in Seattle are free from all Groundhog Day traditions, superstitions, old-wives tales, and/or empirical observations. 

Sometimes a sunny day is just a sunny day, as Freud once observed.  A sunny February 2nd in Seattle is (1) a miracle, and (2) simply a day to be enjoyed in shorts and t-shirts.  We may or may not have six more weeks of winter.  But "winter" in Seattle isn't what most of the nation -- especially those parts of the nation subject to the reign of the groundhog -- call "winter."  To us, it's just a little more rainfall than usual.

Happy Groundhog Day!