Believe It Or Not, Groundhog Day Is a Christian Holiday.
Groundhog Day, February 2nd, is the strangest of American holidays. A groundhog comes out of his hole and determines how long winter will last. It’s a holiday so strange it is hard to conceive how anyone could have made it up. But the holiday makes sense when you look deeper into its origins, which turn out to be Catholic, and behind that, Jewish.
Groundhog Day shares its day with a much older Catholic holiday, Candlemas. Candlemas is the fortieth and final day of the Christmas season, and is known to the modern church as the Feast of the Presentation.
The story is this: Back during the time of Christ, a woman of the Jewish faith was considered ritually unclean after giving birth. She had to wait forty days after delivery to appear in a Temple or synagogue again. Why forty? Judaism places traditional importance on the number forty — the passage of forty days (or years) is the time needed for an impure person to become pure again. ( Forty is a recurrent number in the Bible. For example, Jesus went out into the desert to pray for forty days; Moses and Israel wandered in the wilderness for forty years before arriving in Canaan; Moses fought the Pharaoh in Egypt for forty days to obtain the freedom of Israel; God spent forty days giving Moses the Law at the summit of Mount Sinai; Noah’s flood was forty days.)
And so Mary, having given birth to Jesus on December 25, would have presented him in the Temple forty days later, which would be February 2, the first day she would have been ritually clean. Thus, the last day of the extended Christmas season is the presentation of the first-born son Jesus at the Jewish Temple. (Lest anyone get the wrong idea, the Church never has argued that December 25 was the actual birthday of Jesus. It is a symbolic date, set in the middle of winter, mainly because Easter is in the spring, and it made sense to have a religious calendar with high points at opposite times of the year. And yes, it is true that Christmas replaced an older pagan winter festival. The Church does not deny that either.)
In the Middle Ages, this fortieth day was called Candlemas. There was a tradition of candle lighting on that day, and there developed a belief that if the sun shone on Candlemas, overcoming the light of the candles, there would be six more weeks (40 days!) of winter. If the sky was overcast, the candles would shine bright, and spring would come early. There is an old English song that tells the story.
If Candlemas be fair and bright
Come Winter, have another flight
If Candlemas brings clouds and rain
Go, Winter, and come not again.
Candlemas never quite made it to the United States. The U.S. was founded as a Protestant rather than a Catholic society. In general, the early American Protestants were followers of theologians like John Calvin, Martin Luther, and John Wesley, who rejected much of the pageantry of Catholicism and tended to downplay religious celebrations. The Puritans, for their part, did not celebrate holidays at all. As a result, the candle lighting of Candlemas tended to fall away, but the story of the additional six weeks of winter stuck around.
So without the candles to attach to, how did the lore about the end of winter get transferred to a groundhog? To make a long story short, Eastern Pennsylvania was settled by the Dutch and Germans. The Germans originally had a tradition that the length of winter could be predicted by the first bear sighting, which makes sense since bears hibernate and would emerge at the end of winter. But as the European population grew, bears became scarce, and the story of weather prediction was transferred to the badger, even though badgers do not hibernate. When Germans moved to Pennsylvania, there were no badgers, so the story was transferred again, this time to the groundhog.
And here we are.
Merry Candlemas!
