Especially sent out to Dannielle S, the Hedgie Queen of Gather.
February 2 is the Winter cross-quarter day, which means it's the halfway point between the Winter Solstice and the Vernal Equinox. In Europe it's always been a day for getting ready for Spring, with fertility rituals and hunts for hibernating animals to see if they were waking up yet. The chief pre-Christian celebrations were the Roman Lupercalia and the Celtic Imbolc. After the Church "conquered" Europe, the old pagan holidays were appropriated and "Christianized"; the old February holiday became Candlemas, the day of the purification of the Virgin Mary. But many of the old pagan rituals continued to be practiced on Candlemas.
In Germany, one of the critters looked for on Candlemas to see if Spring might come a little early was the humble but adorable Hedgehog:
Apparently Hedgie would traditionally come briefly up out of hibernation to sniff out the situation before heading back to sleep for a little longer, sort of like a pre-digital snooze alarm. The German farmer folk would watch how Hedgie reacted to conditions and figure out whether there was more bad weather coming or if maybe the bad stuff was over for this year.
Many of these German farming families emigrated to North America in the late 17th and early 18th centuries and settled in Pennsylvania. When Candlemas came along, they looked for Hedgie, and it was then that they discovered that Hedgie didn't live in the New World. Gott im Himmel! How were they supposed to prognosticate the coming of Spring without Hedgie?
But the New World did have a critter as common as Hedgie living in the fields, the humble Groundhog; they knew his cousin, the Marmot, back in the Old World. So with no Hedgehogs to look for, they adopted the Groundhog to predict the coming of Spring on Candlemas:
It was from those Pennsylvania German farmers that the tradition developed in the US of watching for a Groundhog to come out of his hole on Candlemas. Eventually everyone else started following their example; after all, Groundhogs are everywhere in the US. And in 1886 the day was officially dubbed Groundhog Day, and so it has continued since then. Do you know anybody who still celebrates Candlemas? But everybody celebrates Groundhog Day!
But just think; if some of those German farmers had had a little foresight and thought to smuggle Hedgie aboard the boat when they came over, we could be celebrating Hedgehog Day instead. The mind boggles!
© 2009 by A. Roy Hilbinger
(hedgehog picture attributed to Lars Karlsson and distributed under the Creative Commons Attribution ShareAlike 2.5 License.)
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Comments: 36
Great fun Mr. Hilbinger, you've led me home!
Thanks for the history - I was wondering about Candlemas, and now I don't have to look it up. ;)
Chana, according to first century Judaism, a woman was rendered impure by giving birth (this is known as niddah in Hebrew), and had to wait 40 days until she could be purified in the mikvah (the ritual bath). I understand that Orthodox Jews still observe this.
As for Groundhogs... Well, they are rodents after all (all Marmots, the family they belong to, are rodents), and are classed as Ground Squirrels. I actually think they look like big squirrels (only without a tail).
We hedgehogs celebrate Ye Heyghoge Awakenen at this time of year, watching (fruitlessly, at these latitudes, but it's a very old custom dating back to the old country) for our constellation Musca the Fly.
I just couldn't help but think of you when I ran across an article on About.com on Groundhog Day that mentioned the Hedgehog as the German farmers' critter of choice for predicting when Spring would come. After reading that this article was inevitable!
Curiously, the animal you look for according to Hungarian folklore is the bear. While that looks more risky than a hedgehog, there's been no sign of actual bears living in the present-day territory of Hungary for quite some time, so it's not much of a problem.
Sue, it's just stuff mt sticky mind picks up. I just happen to be on a Pagan mailing list, and the list owner forwards the About.com Pagan Page by Patti Wiggington every week. The one we got Saturday had links to articles about Imbolc/Candlemas/Groundhog Day, and the info about Hedgehogs was in one of them. Then I looked up some stuff in Wikipedia (including the picture of ol' Tiggy up there), and voilà! There was my article. It ain't me, it's all the stuff the Internet offers with the click of a mouse!
This is my favorite way of learning new things about old things.
Honor scars for a Warrior, you must have done something right since the whole article is gone.
I was trying to figure why it was rated down...then I saw your comment above...that's just sad, I can't understand why people feel the need to do this.
Btw, I love this phrase: "sort of like a pre-digital snooze alarm" ;-)
Bob, I don't know how good an idea that would be; the INS might try to deport it as an illegal alien! Although I do believe you can buy Hedgehogs as pets now - the Wikipedia article mentions that they're now raised domestically. Yes, now you, too, can have an adorable Mrs. Tiggywinkle in your very own home!