What is the History Groundhog Day?

Groundhog Day, February 2. You know it as the day that the famous Punxsatawney Phil emerges from his ceremonial hole in Pennsylvania to check for a shadow. If he sees one, tradition dictates that he will scurry back into his warm home to sleep through six more weeks of winter; if not, we will see an early spring.

Why a groundhog? Why a shadow? Why that day? And why six more weeks of winter?

Believe it or not, Groundhog Day has roots reaching back into prehistory, embracing Christian and Northern European pagan beliefs for thousands of years. But to understand why this specific day, you also have to understand the significance of the number 40, and why so darn many things in the Bible and Mayan calendrical history and Celtic history are broken into 40-day increments. And surprisingly, there is layer upon layer of meaning to this somewhat silly holiday.

Groundhog Day: The 40^th Day

What many people don't realize is that Groundhog Day is exactly forty days after Christmas Day. And if you read the Bible at all, forty days is significant: forty days of flooding, forty days in the desert being tempted by Satan, and forty days on Ararat for Moses. The forty-day period is critically important to Aramaic cultures, to the ancient Mesopotamians, to the Northern Europeans, to the Mayans.

Groundhog Day, in essence, is the first holiday in the year according to this old way of counting, and really marks sweeping away the old year in anticipation of the new one. The first day of each 40-day cycle, as evidenced in the Bible and lots of other ancient writings, is seen as epochal, a day that starts a fresh period. This is an ancient belief, and its complete meaning is lost to history, but has much to do with how calendars were calculated.

Groundhog Day: Candlemas

Candlemas Day is bright and clear, there'll be two winters in the year. This Scottish rhyme is widely recognized as the source of Groundhog Day as we recognize it. But it's not just Scottish; in 1841, an entry in a Morgantown, Pennsylvania, storekeeper's diary talks about the German belief that a groundhog peeks out of his hole to check for sunshine, and goes back to sleep if he sees a shadow.