Punxsutawney Phil says, "No surfing yet!"

Punxsutawney Phil saw his shadow on February 2. I guess that means I can’t start waxing my surf board until March 16.

The weird Groundhog Day event seems to have grown out of an ancient February 2nd European festival known as Candlemas that celebrated the day Mary and Joseph presented their baby Jesus at the Temple. Clergy in Europe would bless household candles marking the growing light of our Lord that would illuminate the darkness of the home just as the light of Christ would illuminate the darkness of the soul.

The Germans had evidently blended the Candlemas festival with some Teutonic legends to conclude that if the sun made an appearance on Candlemas Day an animal would cast a shadow and dive back into its hole predicting six more weeks of bad weather.

Here we are centuries later, a continent away, and a little groundhog is Punxsutawney, Pennsylvania has cornered the market on Candlemas since the first Groundhog Day of 1886. I guess that doesn’t really matter anymore. Who lights their homes with candles anyways, and there’s something about blessing a compact fluorescent that just doesn’t seem to convey the same ardor.

What does pique my curiosity is that the ancients seemed to have a sense of harmony with nature. Cows lay down before a storm. The brown strip of the woolly caterpillar gets longer. Elephants head to higher ground before an earthquake. Researches simply understand that animals have a keen sense of their surroundings and react to nature’s anomalies long before our busy minds human minds can.

A little Punxsutawney Phil every winter might reminds us that there is a lot going on around us the close our eyes to. And when we do, we may be missing some of the greatest displays of God’s creation. “The earth is the Lord’s and the fullness there of.” (psalm 24)