Googs!

A Historie of Groundhogge’s Day

Groundhog’s Day today has become a charming February staple of school children and morning network shows. Both constituencies would be shocked to learn the tradition’s more lurid origins.

The practice has it’s roots in a peculiar judicial pact between the Pennsylvania Dutch and the “English” of Western Pennsylvania. With connotations of The Passion, every winter the Pennsylvania Dutch would turn over their most wanton criminal/sinner to the English for punishment. These cast-offs were guilty of crimes so heinous that even shunning was not severe enough.

So at the behest of the Pennsylvania Dutch, the English would take these men and women and bury them alive (hence the term ‘groundhogge’ or today’s more modern spelling: groundhog).

After three days the groundhogge was dug up (give it up for our forefathers, they knew how to work Biblical symbolism) in front of the Pennsylvania Dutch elders. If the sinner still lived, s/he was beaten to death with 2x4s to be used later in that day’s barnraising.

Eventually the vagaries of societal niceties and the law caught up with this tradition, and so the sinner was replaced by a rodent, and still breathing after three days was replaced by “seeing one’s shadow.”

Nobody knows where the six more weeks of winter comes from. That part’s just weird.