Groundhog Day is the traditional midpoint of winter because it occurs halfway between the winter solstice and the spring equinox. Early Christians called it Candlemas, when believers would bring beeswax candles to the church to be blessed. For European pagans before the rise of Christianity, it was known as Imbolc, one of eight solar holidays in their calendar, consisting of the solstices, the equinoxes and the "quarter-days," of which Imbolc was one.

There's a old farmers' rhyme which I've heard but can't remember, to the effect that you should have left by Candlemas Day half the wood and half the hay, or you'd be in trouble. For those of us who heat with wood, this is no joke. April can indeed be the cruellest month if you're out of firewood, lengthening days or no, and there's still no new grass for the critters to eat. It's still grounds for divorce in Maine if a husband neglects to provide his wife with dry firewood for cooking, or worse, no wood at all.

It was my father's people, the Germans immigrants of Eastern Pennsylvania, the so-called Pennsylvania Dutch, who brought over the lore of the groundhog and the shadow sometime in the 1800s. They had a similar folklore about badgers in the Old Country, and would not plant their crops until the badgers appeared in the spring. The Chamber of Commerce of Punxsutawney, PA, the self-proclaimed Groundhog Capital of the World, invented Punxsutawney Phil as a way to boost business, and it gradually became more and more of a media event.

When I was a kid growing up in Western PA, my brother and I used to hunt groundhogs on weekends with our grandfather, rambling around the back roads in his old Chrysler that smelled of pipe and cigar smoke, a .222 Remington with a 10-power scope in the back. We sighted in that little rifle and practiced until we could fire a 3-inch group at 200 yards. We seldom missed. I can attest that there were a lot of groundhogs in that part of PA, even after we were through. The farmers were eager to be rid of them, since they'd frequently break their haying equipment on burrow mounds. My grandfather would give the slain grounghogs to a poor black family on our way home. We'd pull up in front of their house and the old man would take his pipe out of his teeth and mutter to his wife "Here come the groundhog man." They said it tasted a lot like pork, and I guess that's why they call it ground hog.