According to event coordinators, Chuck did not see his shadow on this cloud-covered Sunday morning, an indicator that an expedited spring is on its way, according to the Groundhog Day lore.
Meanwhile, in Pennsylvania, Punxsutawney Phil did, in fact, see his shadow, according to The Weather Channel. This means winter could drag on for another six weeks.
The Weather Channel posits that while statistics show Phil’s “tongue-in-cheek prognostications,” and those of other clairvoyantly classified woodchucks, are less than accurate, the tradition serves as a welcomed break in the “monotony of long, dark winters.”
A history of Groundhog Day by Stephen Winick of the U.S. Library of Congress states the folklore holiday dates back to 1887.
Winick cites the 2003 book Groundhog Day, by folklorist Don Yoder, which traces the roots of Groundhog Day to the same cycle of pre-Christian festivals that lead to the autumn holiday Halloween and May Day, a commemoration of the summer season.
“In astronomical terms, these holidays were the cross-quarter days, those days that fall midway between a solstice and an equinox,” Winick write. “These festivals were apparently celebrated throughout Europe by the various tribes we now refer to as Celts. Yoder believes that they influenced the sense of time of all Europe and of the European colonies in America.”
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