groundhogs of America
In America we look to woodchucks. Every February 2, in Punxsutawney (from the Lenape Punkwsutènay, “mosquito-town”), white men in top hats who call themselves the “Inner Circle” gather around Punxsy Phil’s burrow to see if he sees his shadow or not. It looks like Christmas caroling on acid. “With this cane,” declares one of the men, “I can communicate with Phil!” They pull a fat groundhog out of a cage that looks like a tree stump and they brandish little scrolls. This year Phil predicted more winter, but his accuracy is only about 40 percent. You might as well put on a top hat and consult anything else.
(It feels important to mention that all the Inner Circle guys have nicknames like “Burrow Master” and “Big Chill.” I would say “as if they’re all in some drinking club that got out of hand,” but that seems to be pretty clearly what this is. Of the holiday, Butch “Iceman” Philliber writes: “It is adult Christmas cone [sic] to enjoy and believe in the magic of Punxsutawney Phil. We will be waiting for you.....”)
Phil has been making predictions since 1887, but groundhog-watching goes back much further: the Pennsylvania Dutch brought over the tradition from Germany, where it has roots in the ancient Celtic rite of Imbolc (Feb. 1) and the Christian holy day of Candlemas (Feb. 2). An 1841 account from a Pennsylvanian diarist describes Candlemas as “the day on which, according to the Germans, the ground-hog peeps out of his winter quarters.” From Pennsylvania, the holiday has been awkwardly franchised across the country. This year, Atlanta’s General Beauregard Lee, namesake of not one but two Confederate generals, emerged from a plantation-house-style enclosure to predict the weather. Birmingham Bill slept through the holiday for the fourth straight time, forcing an opossum named Birmingham Jill to step in. Nebraska’s Unadilla Bill is just a taxidermied groundhog duct-taped to the hood of a Ford Falcon; it is unclear how he reaches a verdict. (There are many, many more: Balzac Billy, Queen Charlotte, Buckeye Chuck, Chesapeake Chuck, Chuckles IX, Chattanooga Chuck, Staten Island Chuck, Dunkirk Dave, Fred la marmotte, French Creek Freddie, Grover the Groundhog, Jimmy, Milltown Mel, Octorora Orphie, Pierre C. Shadeaux, Shubenacadie Sam, Sir Walter Wally, Woodstock Willie, Wiarton Willie, etc.)
This proliferation of groundhogs likely has less to do with Big Chill & co. than with the enduring popularity of the 1993 film Groundhog Day, in which Bill Murray plays a weatherman stuck in a time loop while on assignment in Punxsutawney. “Groundhog Day,” of course, now mainly refers to the movie’s central conceit, a holding pattern that’s some combination of Camus’s Myth of Sisyphus and the forty-hour workweek. It has also been particularly applicable to homebound pandemic life, something that Dan “Moonshine” McGinley noted at the beginning of this year’s Punxsy proceedings.
The US is a land of silly holidays, but few are more American than Groundhog Day, an obscure European religious tradition commercialized into a corny pageant and later rebranded by Hollywood into shorthand for a suicide-inducing feeling of malaise. (In some ways it’s a comedic foil to Thanksgiving, which is also a European religious tradition commercialized into a corny pageant, except that pageant involves kids dressing up as caricatures of the people their forefathers dispossessed.)
Last year the president of PETA suggested that an AI groundhog “could keep Punxsutawney at the center of Groundhog Day but in a much more progressive way,” which sounds expensive but also ruins another aspect of the holiday, which is that everyone is in on the joke. We already have an AI groundhog; it’s called numerical weather prediction, and it’s part of the reason that five-day weather forecasts have 90 percent accuracy. Gathering around a groundhog to celebrate its dumb, animal movements is fun and funny in part because we have absolutely no use for it.
ben tapeworm