This story starts in Jerusalem, way back during the Roman Empire.

     There was a righteous elder named Simeon. He had been visited by the Holy Ghost, who assured him that he would not die until he had witnessed the arrival of the Messiah. One day while he was in the Temple, a couple named Mary and Joseph walked in, bringing their son to be consecrated. Simeon lifted the infant boy in his arms and praised God, saying, “Sovereign Lord, as you have promised, you may dismiss your servant in peace / For my eyes have seen your salvation, which you have prepared in the sight of all nations / a light for the revelation of the Gentiles and the glory of the people of Israel.” And there it was: the first public recognition of Jesus as Christ. The moment is known as the ‘Presentation at the Temple of Jerusalem.’ You can read about it in the Gospel of Luke, Chapter 2.

     Later, around the year 380 AD, a Spanish pilgrim wrote in her diary that she had witnessed a feast, in early February, at the Basilica of the tomb of Christ. And that’s the first record we have that early Christians were marking Jesus’ coming-out moment in the Temple with an annual event known as the ‘Feast of the Presentation.’

     The Romans, meanwhile, were crazy about standardization. In 325, at the Council of Nicea, Emperor Constantine the Great sorted out a lot of conflicting details among the early Christian sects, and set the official dates for such things as Christmas and Easter. A bit later, in 542, Emperor Justinian wanted to celebrate the end of a terrible plague in Constantinople. He did it at the Presentation Feast, and held that event on February 2, exactly 40 days after Christmas. This made the Presentation Feast a much more noteworthy event, and locked that date into the Christian calendar.  

     Some time later, the focus of this annual event started to change. Somebody recalled that, at the time of Jesus’s birth, Jewish mothers had to make an offering in the Temple to remove the stain of childbirth before they could return to religious ceremonies. Well, Christ certainly wasn’t conceived the natural way, so you could argue that Mary wasn’t compelled to do so. Nonetheless, she had done the honorable thing and made her offering. And so, according to this logic, she should be celebrated for her humility and penitence. Over time, the holiday became more mom-focused and increasingly solemn; by the Middle Ages the ‘Presentation Feast’ had morphed into the ‘Purification Feast.’

     Jump forward to 1497, to Tenerife, in the Canary Islands. Each year the islanders held a harvest feast at the end of August which they celebrated with fires and candles. But this particular year, two of the locals claimed they had been visited on the beach by an image of Mother Mary. In response, in an act of pure Roman Christian standardization, the Portuguese overlord subsumed the harvest feast within the Purification Feast, renamed it ‘Dia de la Candelaria,’ and rebranded it with…a procession of lights.

     The idea caught fire in Europe and spread throughout Christendom. Within a couple of centuries, the feast day had become synonymous with a solemn presentation of candles. And as the British Empire took over the world, the whole shebang eventually became known by a new name derived from old English: ‘Candlemas.’

     But hang on, there’s one last modern twist. Here in the New World, there are some things beyond Roman control. When the English first arrived on these shores and met the Delaware Indians, they were told that the tribe descended from a rodent named, ‘Wojak,’ which they transcribed into English as ‘Woodchuck.’ And they must have been struck by how much a woodchuck sticking its head up out of its hole in the late winter must look kinda like… a candle. Which somehow was reminiscent of the English Candlemas tradition of placing a candle in the window to see if the sun was shining, with the counter-intuitive reasoning that if it was a bright day and it threw a shadow, that would portend six more weeks of winter to come.

     Makes, um, sense? Anyways, the Americans started watching for woodchucks to pop out of their winter holes and predict the weather. Today the most noteworthy place where they do this is at a village in Pennsylvania that the Delaware called, the ‘town of the sandflies.’ Which in their language was, “ponksad-uteney.” And the event has become pretty famous…

     All of which means that, on February 2, the entire Christian backstory has been Punxutawney’d. Sure, it’s the day of the Presentation Feast, but unless you’re reading Luke Chapter 2 you probably don’t know that. And it’s Purification Feast Day, but no one is celebrating penitent mothers. And it’s Candlemas, but hardly anyone’s lighting any candles.

     Here in America – the most powerful Judeo-Christian offspring of the Roman Empire – on February 2, it’s all about a rodent named Phil.

     Temple, Schmemple. It’s Groundhog Day.