Groundhog Day

So according to Punxsutawney Phil we are in store for an early spring. Sounds good to me. I've seen enough snow for the winter. I'm glad the furry little fella didn't see his shadow.

How is it that Phil became such a prognosticator of the seasons?

I was able to find this on the origin of Phil:

In 1887, a newspaper editor belonging to a group of groundhog hunters from Punxsutawney called the Punxsutawney Groundhog Club declared that Phil, the Punxsutawney groundhog, was America's only true weather-forecasting groundhog. The line of groundhogs that have since been known as Phil might be America's most famous groundhogs, but other towns across North America now have their own weather-predicting rodents, from Birmingham Bill to Staten Island Chuck to Shubenacadie Sam in Canada.

So this didn't answer my question of how he became the predictor of the seasons. I had to dig a little deeper to find out:

In western countries in the Northern Hemisphere, the official first day of spring is almost seven weeks (46–48 days) after Groundhog Day, on March 20 or March 21. The custom could have been a folk embodiment of the confusion created by the collision of two calendrical systems. Some ancient traditions marked the change of season at cross-quarter days such as Imbolc when daylight first makes significant progress against the night. Other traditions held that spring did not begin until the length of daylight overtook night at the Vernal Equinox. So an arbiter, the groundhog/hedgehog, was incorporated as a yearly custom to settle the two traditions. Sometimes spring begins at Imbolc, and sometimes winter lasts six more weeks until the equinox.

Let me get this straight... they selected a groundhog as their arbitrator. Wow... how did we make it to 

the 21st century.

If you have a different origin of the groundhog day. Please share it with us.

Here's to an early spring!

-Red

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