February second is Groundhog Day, when the groundhog and her shadow predict either six more weeks of winter or an early spring. Six weeks from February second only gets you to mid-March. How were they defining early spring? Mid-March is not spring in Michigan, and in California, where I used to live, February is not winter.

So where did the story come from? Ages ago in Ireland, February first was Imbolc, holiday of Brigid, the Gaelic goddess of spring and fertility. It was about as early in the year as you could tell the days were getting longer. Candles were lit in celebration of that and the possibility, in Ireland, of winter ending in fewer than six weeks. When Christianity came to Ireland Brigid became a saint, and her holiday Candlemass. Gaelic holidays ran from sunset of one day to sunset of the next, which I’m guessing is how it moved to February second.

Animal behavior was often used in the past to predict weather, from hedgehogs to badgers to bears to groundhogs. There’s even a cat in Ohio who makes spring weather predictions by how he eats pierogi. The hope was that animals in their ancestral innocence and closeness to nature could tell, in ways we no longer could, whether conditions were ripe for moving out into the world. Punxsatawny Phil has been the one to watch since the 1880’s. He’s never been very accurate, but he completes the evolutionary cycle of many Western holidays (Halloween, for instance): from pagan religion, through Christianity, to secular. So we have Groundhog Day. Sadly, according to Wikipedia, “the observed behavior of groundhogs… was that they mostly come out of their burrows in mid-March, regardless of Groundhog Day weather.”

Daylight grows but winter persists in February – it’s not a coincidence that Groundhog Day was a movie about being stuck in an endless time loop. But it was also a movie about taking advantage of endless time loops, making good use of the present. As A.E. Housman wrote:

“And since to look at things in bloom
Fifty springs are little room,
About the woodlands I will go
To see the cherry hung with snow.”