Today is a cross-quarter day, one of the four days of the year that fall between the quarter days. The quarter days, of course, were (or still are, really) festivals roughly equating to the solstices and equinoxes: Lady Day on March 25, St. John’s on June 24th, Michaelmas on Sept. 29, and Christmas on Dec. 25th. Smack-dab in between those days, there are the cross-quarter days, the old Celtic quarter days: Imbolc, Beltaine, Lughnasadh, and Samhain, on February, May, August, and November 1st, respectively. Notice something? Right close to several of those days are festivals we still know of today: May Day on May 1st; Halloween or “All Hallows E’en”, the evening before All Saint’s Day on Nov.1st; and then here we have Candlemas, also known as Groundhog Day or St. Brigid’s Day, on February 2nd.
In the old European traditions, Candlemas was an important day. It was the start of the agricultural year, the time when maids and farm labourers were hired or re-hired and got their yearly wages. In the Alpine regions, it was and still is also the last day of Christmastide. The Christmas tree, which is put up and decorated on Christmas Eve (not in early December like in America) stays up until Candlemas. Of course, by then a very small sneeze in its general vicinity will cause an avalanche of dry pine needles to shower to the ground, leaving a prickly pole with some sadly denuded sticks protruding from it that are valiantly attempting to hold up the decorations. Time to pack them away until next winter.
Because this winter, I’m glad to say, is more than half over now. If the quarter day of winter solstice means the turning point in the light, where we celebrate the changeover from the days getting shorter and shorter to the long ascend towards summer solstice (when I’ll be moaning about there being too much light, especially at 4am when the birds are yelling outside my window), the cross-quarter day of Candlemas means that we can actually see the days getting longer. By now, we have a reasonable chance of having our breakfast and maybe even cooking our supper in daylight, and back in the days when the only artificial light people had were candles, from Candlemas on they might be able to do their spinning without them.
Candlemas is called Candlemas because it was the day when the yearly supply of candles for both church and home was blessed. I only just learned that among the domestic candles people took to be blessed was a black “weather candle”, which was lit by way of a prayer for safety when there was a thunderstorm or other dangerous weather threatening. The black colour originally came from the weather candles being made of the sooty wax drippings of a church’s votive candles. People back in the day knew how to recycle.
When I thought about what other names February 2nd has, I remembered that way back when I first started blogging, I’d already written a post about it. I looked it up, and it’s actually quite funny (even if I say so myself). I’m pretty sure the photo of the groundhog (or gopher, rather) was one I took myself on a camping trip, but I can’t remember exactly what year or where.
The fact that in today’s English-speaking world most people know the term “Groundhog Day” is also funny. Because what they know, or associate with it, isn’t necessarily February 2nd. I mean, when you saw the title of this post, did you immediately think I was going to talk about a day that repeats itself over and over in an endless loop? If you did, you can thank the Bill Murray movie. I like it when a piece of fiction that was created simply for entertainment brings a whole new understanding of a concept to our culture, and becomes so firmly embedded in our ideas that it changes the very definition of a word.
That’s what culture is: transmission of ideas from one person to another. Celtic Imbolc, black weather candles in the Alps, the Groundhog Day movie. It ties us to the people around us and to those who came before.
Life, the Universe, and Groundhog Day (and Groundhog Day, and Groundhog Day, and Groundhog… Never mind). Happy Candlemas!