"Chuckie" wrote in message
oups.com...
It is groundhog day tommorow.

Thus is the nutso ritual of this mid winter holiday. Why
do we celebrate this? I haven't a clue.

If you look at the Wheel of the Year, and mark off the equinoxes and the
solstices, then you'll find that there are midpoints between these dates. In
the European pagan calendar these holidays are Imbolc (Groundhog Day), May
Day, Lammas, and Samhain (Halloween), but these holidays, because of their
ties to the seasons, are pretty much universal in all cultures.

Groundhog Day is the remant in our culture of what was Candlemas, and before
that, Imbolc. There's a gardening-related article on the Groundhog
Day/Imbolc connection he
http://landscaping.about.com/cs/pest...dhog_day_4.htm. In the
Shinto/Japanese calendar, the holiday is Setsubun-sai, and in the Hindu
calendar, Vasant Panchami. The equivalent holiday in the Jewish calendar is
Tu B'Shevat, which this year is coming in a couple of weeks -- the whole
Jewish calendar is running late this year. (You can find an interesting
little article about this holiday he
http://telshemesh.org/hp/fifteen_psa...the_trees.html).

You can readily understand why this time of the year is marked and
celebrated. Here, you can feel a tiny kernal of warmth, an ember of what is
the spring-to-be, wrapped in the icy tendrils of winter. It's not yet
spring, but you can feel that the worst of winter is over. That is the magic
of this holiday.

--
Warm Regards,

Claire Petersky
http://www.bicyclemeditations.org/
Sponsor me for the Big Climb! See: www.active.com/donate/cpetersky06
See the books I've set free at:
http://bookcrossing.com/referral/Cpetersky