Favorite Things Friday: Groundhog Day Edition

Groundhog day is increasingly one of my favorite holidays. It has zero religious significance (a bonus in my book), and it boasts small mammals, attention to the natural world, morning drinking and top hats. It occurs at a point where we really need a holiday: just after January ends and at the beginning of cruel February, as optimistic New Year resolutions start to wane and the reality hits that we’ve got about two more months of cold weather coming (regardless of what the rodent “sees”).



I also love Groundhog Day because of the ubiquitous and eponymous (does that work in this context?) Bill Murray movie. As a kid with a February birthday, I never wanted to have a movie theater birthday because the movies that typically come out in January & February are, well, shit. Groundhog Day, released to coincide with the holiday, was one glorious exception. Truthfully it’s kind of a grown-up movie for a 12-year-old’s birthday party (I believe I got a Blossom-style purple hat as a gift that year) but believe me, it made my parents very happy and my older self retroactively so as well.



I love the Groundhog Day movie for its bitterness, its recognition of misery and futility and cold and darkness. And I love it for its depiction of the imperfect human spirit doing battle with those inevitabilities and making good. I love it in spite of Andy McDowell, whose allure genuinely eludes me – she is a wooden actress with a weird accent and a strange face, and her outfits in the film are truly, deeply hideous. I love it in spite of the fact that Bill Murray could never be as happy/changed as he’s depicted as in the end of the film, and that he’s a bit rapey for a good chunk of it. I love it in spite of the rodenticide and the fact that it celebrates Pennsylvania, which except for the semi-bright spot of Pittsburgh is basically one long awful turnpike with occasional rest stops where people steal your Hannukah presents.



Next year, I may have the opportunity to celebrate Groundhog Day at the holiday’s ground zero, Gobbler’s Knob (yes, really). In the meantime, this year I settled for a strange pseudo-celebration of Groundhog Day in DC with “Potomac Phil,” Punxatawney Phil’s more . . . deceased brother. There were paper top hats, groundhog cookies, a PETA protest and some patriotic singing. In the evening I took in a viewing of the movie over Klondike bars, beer and mozzarella sticks. Then, in keeping with the film’s theme of mindless, destructive repetition, I watched half of the movie again at home with E.

And now it’s Friday! And the rest of February (including a looming thirtieth birthday) stretches in front of me. It's gonna be cold, it's gonna be grey, and it's gonna last [me] for the rest of [my] life. But! Winter, slumbering in the open air, wears on its smiling face a dream of spring.

Ciao.