Groundhog Day.

We can add that to the ever growing list of events/items/holidays/things that I know about but don’t really know all that much about.

When Cody became of the question-asking-age many years ago, I realized that my vast banks of knowledge on such things are really not all that vast or deep and that I actually know less about such things than I thought I did.  Now that I am a teacher, I am discovering even more of these black holes of knowledge.  When you have to teach a roomful of second graders about a holiday or a person from history you need to know your stuff.  (Could you teach a gaggle of students who Jonny Appleseed was, why we celebrate Valentine’s Day, or how it was decided which Presidents faces should be carved into Mount Rushmore (and how the local Native American’s who lived there at the time felt about it)?)

Enter Groundhog Day.  I have never really given it much attention.  Here are some things that come to mind when someone mentions Groundhog Day to me:

• It was a hilarious movie
• The Curious George Episode where I learned groundhogs are also called whistle pigs
• There is some famous, and rather fat looking, groundhog in Pennsylvania that gets a lot of attention this time of year
• It is the day Husband and I got married 13 years ago (mostly because I let him pick the date so he would have no excuse to forget it and he picked 02-02-02.  He has never forgotten it – so far.)
• Something about a shadow and a prediction about 6 or 8 more weeks of winter

And so it was this morning as I was drinking my coffee and Cody and Carter were partaking in their weekend morning computer time, that I learned an interesting and perfectly sensible fact about Groundhog day.  Cody loves to watch Wild Kratts on PBS kids and this morning he picked an episode about Groundhog day.

cody:  They come up to find a girl.

me: What?  Who comes up from where?  I had no idea what the heck he was talking about as he did not preface his comment with any background or topic type.

cody:  Groundhogs.  You know they are also called whistle pigs.  They are looking for a girl.

me: A girl?  I was slow to catch up.  I only had drunk about half a cup of coffee – that is my defense.

cody:  A groundhog girl.  The boys wake up from their hibernation earlier than the girls.  They are looking for a girl groundhog, not their shadow.

I looked it up, and sure enough he is right.  It is all about getting the girl.

A flower for you, my dear?

Oh, and one more confession regarding my lack of Groundhog day knowledge.  After having written this entire post, I questioned whether the holiday had an apostrophe “s” at the end.  It does not.  In fact it has no “s” at the end at all.  I thought it did and have been pronouncing it like that forever.  I promptly went back and corrected all my Groundhogs days into Groundhog days.