By Edwin Cooney
About sixty plus nine tenths of a mile northeast of Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania in rural Jefferson county is a community of 5,790 people called Punxsutawney. Its inhabitants are mostly of German ancestry.
According to Wikipedia, Groundhog Day has its roots in the German Christian tradition of "Candlemas" during which the clergy would bless and distribute candles needed for light during winter. Originally, Germans used hedgehogs to symbolize Candlemas but once in America they switched to woodchucks. The scientific name for woodchuck is Marmota Monax. They weigh somewhere between 12 and 15 pounds and live between 6 and 8 years They can climb trees and swim. They eat fruits and vegetables and whistle when they're frightened or looking for a mate so they're sometimes known as “whistle-pigs.”
They begin their hibernation in mid October and come out for good in March. During hibernation, their body temperature drops and they have a heartbeat of approximately 5 beats per minute. They emerge from hibernation to mate rather than to predict spring.
According to author Elizabeth Hanes, in addition to Punxsutawney Phil, there exist a number of famous woodchucks such as Shubenacadie Sam who dwells in a hollowed out log rather than underground. A native of Shubenacadie Provincial Wildlife Park in Nova Scotia, Sam, by virtue of living furthest east in North America, is the annual champion of all the woodchuck predictors. Then there's Charles G. Hogg known as “Staten Island Chuck” who was born Monday, February 2nd, 1981 and lives in a luxury cabin at the Staten Island Zoo. Every Groundhog Day, the Mayor of New York hauls Chuck out of his cabin to predict when spring will arrive. New Yorkers boast that he has an 80 percent accuracy rate. He even has his own Twitter account so he can correspond with his many fans. In 2009, Chuck gained special notoriety when he bit Mayor Michael Bloomberg on the finger. Other notable groundhogs include General Beauregard Lee from Lilburn, Georgia who's quite the woodchuck with two honorary doctorates and a commendation from the National Weather Service and Wiarton Willie, an albino woodchuck who has led the three-day winter festival at Wiarton, Ontario, Canada groundhog celebrations since Thursday, February 2nd, 1956. Willy also traveled with an entourage and had been linked to scandal. It's said that in 1999, the original albino woodchuck died suddenly just before the festival and was replaced by a stuffed woodchuck due to the emergency commands of convenience. (Note: Willie was pretty spectacular having lived some 43 years between 1956 and 1999 when most of his kin only live about 6 to 8 years!)
Punxsutawney Newspaperman Clymer H. Freas is credited with being the father of Groundhog Day and Punxsutawney Phil since that first fateful celebration in 1887. The ceremony took place at Gobbler Knob, a wooded section of Punxsutawney. Freas was president of the Punxsutawney Groundhog Club which served groundhog dinners at its lodge beginning in the 1880s.
So, sketchy as it is, now you have a brief history of the glory of Groundhog Day. Groundhog Day has absolutely nothing to do with money or politics! Or does it? Well, if you believe that neither politics nor money are at all involved in the celebration of Groundhog Day then you, like Charles G. Groundhog Chuck, must have had a bite of Mayor Bloomberg's finger!
One more thing — The next time you meet a politician you don't much like, why not call him “whistle-pig”?
RESPECTFULLY SUBMITTED,
EDWIN COONEY
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