I’ve always wondered about the history of Groundhog Day, mostly because it doesn’t seem to make any sense. Why would a sunny day where Punxsutawney Phil sees his shadow predict six more weeks of winter? Isn’t sun good? Doesn’t sun ensure warmth is on the way?
    Let’s face it; in Maine no matter what happens with Punxsutawney Phil, we’ve most likely got about 12 more weeks of winter coming our way. As I dug deeper into the history of Groundhog Day I was surprised to learn how old the tradition actually is.
    According to www.stormfax.com the history is rooted in Punxsutawney, Pa., a community settled by the Delaware Indians in the 1700s. The Indians considered groundhogs honorable ancestors, and according to the original creation beliefs of the Delaware Indians, their forebears began life as animals in “Mother Earth” and emerged centuries later to hunt and live as men, and the natives considered the groundhogs to be their ancestral grandfathers.
    According to the Web site, German settlers brought with them the tradition of Candlemas Day. The event was celebrated at the mid point between the winter solstice and the spring equinox. Superstition suggests that if the weather was fair, the second half of winter would be stormy and cold. 
     As an old German saying goes, “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.”
    At some point these two traditions merged and the first official Groundhog Day was celebrated in Pennsylvania in 1886. Since then, many incarnations of Punxsutawney Phil have predicted the weather as a national audience watches and waits to find out if they will need their snow gear well into the Spring – even though the predictions have only been correct 39 percent of the time.
    Of course the predictions of the pampered Punxsutawney Phil, who lives at the Punxsutawney library and waits in a heated burrow inside a simulated tree stump before making his prediction, really has no bearing on the length of winter.
    Groundhog Day is simply a national tradition that seems to insert a little bit of fun into the dull winter months when the days seem far too short and the cold nights much too long. I’ve never been a big fan of winter, and as a child I always anxiously awaited Punxsutawney Phil’s prediction, and I always believed it, even though I knew rationally it made no sense.
    I remember being crushed to learn I would have to suffer through six more weeks of winter. According to stormfax.com Groundhog Day became even more popular when the Bill Murray film of the same name was released in 1993. In 1997 more than 35,000 people traveled to Punxsutawney to witness the prediction of the world’s most famous groundhog  – that’s more than five times as many people who live in the entire county.
    Now that I’ve grown up I realize that the predictions of Punxsutawney Phil mean little or nothing and I begrudgingly accept that winter is here to stay no matter what, but that doesn’t mean I don’t check to see what Punxsutawney Phil’s prediction was. It’s tradition after all. — Brandi Neal