Punxsutawney Phil is scheduled to make his Groundhog Day weather verdict at Gobbler’s Knob on Monday, as tens of thousands of revelers are expected to gather in rural Pennsylvania for the annual ritual. The Punxsutawney Groundhog Club plans to announce what Phil’s long-term forecast means for the season after his handlers bring him onto the stage from his hatch on a tree stump, setting up the familiar question that follows the Feb. 2 holiday: whether winter will linger or spring will arrive early.
The club’s handlers say they interpret Phil’s “groundhogese” — including winks, purrs, chatters and nods — when it comes to what Phil signals about the days ahead. The tradition ties the outcome to whether Phil is deemed to have seen his shadow. In club practice, handlers say Phil not seeing his shadow ushers in an early spring, while seeing it means six more weeks of winter.
This year’s event also features changes on site. The AP report says it is the first Groundhog Day for Phil’s new “zoo” at Gobbler’s Knob, where he splits time between the new enclosure and his longstanding home beside the town library. The report also notes that alcohol is no longer allowed at the site after a series of incidents.
Groundhog Day’s broader popularity has been shaped by pop culture as well. The report says the national interest in the holiday was “supercharged” by the 1993 Bill Murray film of the same name, and it characterizes the day largely as a few hours of “harmless” early-morning fun, despite the serious attention the crowd gives to the forecast.
Club members describe who comes to the grounds and why. The AP report says there are two types of people drawn to Phil’s spot—those hoping to validate their beliefs and those coming to confirm their skepticism. Dan McGinley, a home appraiser and Inner Circle member for about a decade, said the point is to keep the event from turning into self-seriousness, adding, “We just like to remind people that there’s a lot of serious things in this world and this life, and Groundhog Day is not one of them,” and, “We take not taking ourselves too seriously, seriously. But seriously, this is not a serious thing.”
Beyond Punxsutawney, Groundhog Day has evolved into a wider marketing and prediction phenomenon, according to the report. Michael Venos, a 46-year-old database administrator from Roxbury, New Jersey, said he has been collecting stories of Groundhog Day events and their weather predictions for about a decade and has tallied more than 300 prognosticators since the 1880s. Venos described a personal tradition of groundhog cupcakes and a backyard prediction ceremony with groundhog sock puppets, and he said that last year alone there were more than 100 weather predictions that went beyond Phil—credited, in some cases, to an armadillo, ostriches and Nigerian dwarf goats.
The Feb. 2 timing is also rooted in seasonal and cultural references in the report. It says Groundhog Day falls on the midpoint between the winter solstice and the spring equinox, a period that also appears in Celtic tradition and in the Christian holiday of Candlemas. Pennsylvania Germans, the report adds, have been watching groundhogs for centuries, with the tradition in the U.S. tied to the emergence of groundhogs from hibernation and a culture of clubs and celebrations.
In Punxsutawney, the AP report says the tradition began in the 1880s among Pennsylvania Germans through activities that included picnicking, hunting and eating groundhogs. The report’s account ends with the characterization of Phil—along with his “wife” Phyllis and their two pups, Shadow and Sunny—as the creatures whose “ignorance” about the holiday’s elaborate human expectations they would presumably prefer to keep.