February 2, 2018
Dear Everyone:
Happy (belated) Birthday, “Alice”!
Today we here in the
Bay Area
are enjoying a blissfully mild day, with bright sunshine and
temperatures in the mid-70’s.
Naturally. After all,
it’s Groundhog Day.
Every American schoolchild knows, from the First Grade on, that if the
Groundhog leaves his burrow and sees his shadow on February 2nd,
there will be six more weeks of Winter.
If not, Spring will come earlier.
Now, seriously. Where in the
world did such a silly idea come from?
Follow…
Roughly six weeks after the
Winter Solstice,
the Northern
Hemisphere experiences a brief warming trend.
The sun comes out; the snow begins to melt; it looks like Winter
is over. But is it?
In Northern
Europe, centuries before the rise of the
Roman Empire,
people discovered that this suggestion that winter was over could be
deceptive. Those who gobbled
down the last of the winter stores and planted their spring crops too
soon were dismayed when the snows returned and the seedlings died.
So they developed traditions to inform the following generations
of what to watch out for.
Among the
Germanic tribes grew the belief that if the
bear, or
badger, or any other
hibernating
animal, came out of its den, or burrow, to see its shadow on a certain
day, winter would continue for another six weeks, or so.
Along came the Roman Occupation; and with it,
Christianity.
Early Christians became quite adept at appropriating “pagan” customs,
often renaming them.
Celebration of the Winter Solstice was changed to
Christmas.
A fertility festival on the second day of what would become known
as the month of February, was replaced with
Candlemas, a
celebration of the
presentation of the infant Jesus to the Temple in Jerusalem.
And so on. Thus the
old rhyme: “If Candlemas is
fair and clear / There’ll be two winters in the year.”
Centuries later, with the
Reformation,
Protestants
decided to abstain from the ostentatious celebrations of the
Roman Catholic
Church. Among other
things, they actually reverted to the “pagan” belief in the weather
forecasting properties of badgers, bears and such.
The
Protestant Dutch who first colonized the
New World, brought
the practice with them, assigning the honor to the local
groundhog.
And a star was born.
In other news…
I’m sure the tradition of holding the
Super Bowl close
to Candlemas is just a coincidence.
Nevertheless, the
Super Bowl
will take place in two days.
I have noticed this year that there is a lot less attention being paid
to the upcoming barrage of new, and highly-expensive, television
commercials
than in the past.
This may be due to the fact that advertisers have discovered that they
can place commercials on the
Internet for a lot
less than it costs on TV.
Nevertheless, the TV ads are usually entertaining, sometimes sentimental
in the extreme, and occasionally controversial.
I will confess that in the past, I used to record the game in its
entirety. I discovered that
you can “watch” a full four-hour game in under an hour if you
fast-forward through the “boring” parts (i.e., the actual playing of the
game) and just focus on the advertisements.
I haven’t decided if I’ll do that this year.
It probably depends on what, if anything, “Jeannie” wants to do
this weekend. In the
meantime, everybody have a Great Groundhog Day!
Love, as always,
Pete
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