Make Groundhog Day a Federal Holiday, You Cowards
Please stop asking me if I’m talking about the Bill Murray movie
This morning, a horde of men attired in top hots reached into a tree trunk, grabbed a medium-sized rodent named Phil and asked it to predict the weather. The scene: Punxsutawney, Pennsylvania, population 5,000-6,000. The occasion: Groundhog Day. The prediction: early spring.
If you don’t live in the United States (or Canada!), what I’ve just described may be completely nonsensical. If you do live here, you probably learned about this holiday in grade school, but mostly associate the words “Groundhog Day” with the Bill Murray movie, in which he repeats the same day over and over and over for hundreds (thousands? millions?) of years to learn how to love the small things in life.
As far as US holidays go, Groundhog Day has —legally — the same status as Valentine’s Day, April Fool’s Day, Flag Day, Halloween, Black Friday and Cyber Monday, in that there is no legal status. But unlike most of those days, where many Americans cherish our informal traditions (except for Flag Day, what is Flag Day?), Groundhog Day is mostly a joke. This is not helped by the whole Bill Murray factor.
But this year, I’d like to propose that not only should our nation truly learn to celebrate Groundhog Day on historical and cultural grounds — but also that the holiday should be expanded to include all members of the squirrel family, honoring them as the quintessential representatives of the ongoing battle and love affair between humans and the rest of the nature.
The tradition of asking a groundhog to predict the weather for the next few weeks originally comes from Germany. In parts of Europe, February 2 is the Christian holiday known as Candlemas, and Germans mythologized that if a badger came out of his hole on that day and saw his shadow, he’d dive back underground for four more weeks of winter. German immigrants later settled in Pennsylvania and the legend continued — but badgers are not as common in Pennsylvania as groundhogs, and so the legend also shifted somewhat.
But Candlemas is not only a Christian observance. Historians can trace the root of the Candlemas holiday to the “cross-quarters” festivals celebrated by ancient cultures, falling halfway between a solstice and an equinox. In this case, the beginning of February falls exactly halfway between the winter solstice in December and the vernal equinox in March. Another cross-quarter festival, November 1, has become Halloween. The August cross-quarter day is still celebrated as Lammas Day in the British Isles, and the May cross-quarter day is, of course, May Day.
To honor an ancient astronomical ritual, even one with a silly folk story about a small mammal who decides to keep sleeping because it’s too sunny outside, might be enough for some of you to make Groundhog Day a more ritualized observance. But for the sake of argument, let’s put all that aside and assess the merits of Groundhog Day with its literal, modern name: Groundhog Day. Why should such creatures deserve a whole day — especially when even more symbolic animals of this nation, like the bald eagle, the bison, the turkey and the beaver, do not have their own days? (As an aside, separately, I think that beavers should have their own day, but that’s for another story.)
Well, let’s start by meeting the groundhog. Groundhogs, also known as woodchucks, wood-shocks, land beavers, moonacks, siffleux, weenusks, monaxes, thickwood badgers, groundpigs, whistlers and whistlepigs (look it up) are members of the Marmota genus, the marmots. Marmots, in turn, are members of the family Sciuridae — commonly referred to as “squirrels” — which include all manner of species from your standard Eastern gray squirrel and dashing American red squirrel to the chipmunk, the prairie dog, the flying squirrel, the ground squirrel and the giant squirrel.
Squirrels are native to every continent except Antarctica and Australia, often playing key roles in their ecosystems. Many tree squirrels, for example, are seed dispersers, spreading seeds through their caches across the forest. Prairie dogs dig huge underground tunnel systems that end up as secondary homes for rabbits, owls, insects and snakes. Groundhogs themselves also dig holes later used by other species.
But every species has a role to play in its ecosystem — why carve out a day for the squirrel family in particular? Well, in this country, these animals also play an outsized role in the ecosystem of our minds.
In much of the United States, squirrels are considered a nuisance. Gray squirrels eat the seed we put out for birds, and groundhogs dig holes in our tightly cropped lawns and golf courses. Yes yes, we say, they’re wild animals and we like animals, but why do they have to eat my seed and tear up my lawn? And so we fight back by deploying medieval torture devices designed to keep the squirrels out of the bird feeders and by closing up the holes our groundhogs went through all that effort to dig. (Bill Murray was even in a whole other movie featuring a nuisance gopher which, while not a squirrel, was also a puppet so I’m keeping the reference here to make my point.)
These squirrels vex us because they are so similar to us. We have not built our cities, our suburbs or our golf courses with them in mind, but they do not care. These animals are thriving in parks, backyards and even along highways, digging their holes and looking for food wherever they might snag a free meal.
They also vex us because they remind us that we are not in control. We want to put up bird feeders to look at pretty birds, but the squirrel reminds us that nature is more than just the pretty birds. We want our lawns to be neat so we can look at them in tidy admiration, but nature is messy and the groundhog reminds us that we cannot stop the entropy from closing in our manicured horticulture.
And we need them for this vexation. Squirrels are a bother, a nuisance, a fight — but what would we do if we actually won? If we could truly prevent groundhogs from digging and squirrels from eating our seed? Would we be content? Or would we be like Wile E. Coyote after he’d finally killed Roadrunner? Purposeless.
We need this foil, this mixture of recognition and frustration, to remind us that our connection to nature, however complicated, is also the source of so much of our joy. What we would be without the rest of the natural world? What would we be without squirrels to remind us?
Today, I’m calling on Congress and President Biden to do what the day at hand demands of us. Once a year, let’s formally make peace with these animals and take the day off from work and school to acknowledge what our two mammalian clades give each other across the human-nature divide. To remember that this divide isn’t really a divide at all.
On this Groundhog Day and every Groundhog Day, we can learn to love what might annoy us, to find meaning in the commonplace, and to be fulfilled by reality instead of fantasy — all without having to spend eternity in an endless time loop.
The Staten Island groundhog also predicted an early spring. I love your informal approach to this topic, while teaching the reader quite a bit.