Still lie the sheltering snows, undimmed and white;
And reigns the winter’s pregnant silence still;
No sign of spring, save that the catkins fill,
And willow stems grow daily red and bright.
These are days when ancients held a rite
Of expiation for the old year’s ill,
And prayer to purify the new year’s will. – Helen Hunt Jackson, “February”
Though in some climes spring may indeed start to appear soon after this day, it is almost never true in the center of North America; here February is often the coldest part of the winter, and where I live it’s often our snowiest month. So it matters little what any groundhog or other sacred animal supposedly predicts; here, there are still six weeks left of winter, even if it’s a mild one. I’m a little shy of predicting one way or the other this year; though I have a much better record than the famous Pennsylvania rodent (about 70% accuracy to his 39%), I was wrong last year and this winter’s weather has been so weird I’m not sure what to think. Ah, well, que sera, sera; it’s not like we make long-term plans based on such predictions anyhow. Since I’m not a farmer, early spring has no particular charm for me; though it is my second-favorite season after autumn, I’m content to let it come when it comes (unlike autumn, which I’m always happy to see arrive early). In these parts, winter is trickier than summer; though summer rarely makes a surprise reappearance after autumn has arrived, winter barges back in during early spring so often that I have come to expect it. And though I like winter better than summer, there is nothing I dislike more than a rude and unwelcome cold snap in April, just in time to kill the new flowers. Better for the spring to gather her strength and wait to make her debut when she’s good and ready, than to rush things and leave herself vulnerable to winter’s inability to make a punctual exit.
A happy Candlemas to you, dear readers, and Blessed Be!
I prefer to judge my season changes by the length of day.
By mid february, the day is as long as it is in october, and so in that regard qualifies as spring (and November qualifies as winter). There may be lots of snow in February (which, since I love snow, is a good thing in my book) but it is decidedly of the “spring” variety; wetter, heavier, and more quickly melted than its January counterpart.
If Candlemas Day is clear and bright,
winter will have another bite.
If Candlemas Day brings cloud and rain,
winter is gone and will not come again.
So runs an English folk-tale. Here it’s pretty bright, cold (around 4ºC) and the humidity is only 76%.
[And, FWIW, it’s the anniversary of the birth of James Joyce.]
It’s clear and bright as a motherfucker here in the Chicagoland area so I’m not surprised we’re getting more winter. Also that whole, it’s been snowing everyday and isn’t slowing down, thing. It looks like a Winter Wonderland out there, which stops being pretty somewhere around Twelfth Night.
That’s just because after that date you feel a bit gloomy about being a year older. 😉
LOL! That’s it. You hit it on the nail again. 😛
Too bad Joyce could not express himself in English.
(For the easily offended: That was tongue-in-cheek, but I do find him inaccessible. Then again, I’m well aware that one could say the same about Robbie Burns, whom I do “get” and dearly love.)
Re. the weather folk-tale: That sounds like one of the many rules of thumb that Royal Navy sailors had to rely on, back in the day. (Another is that there will always be a bad storm on the first day of fall.) While not what we call science, it was about all we had before modern weather services.
Joyce is certainly hard going at times; you just have to work at it 🙂
And one to you as well. You are certainly a “going-concern” and your many posts are a wealth of valuable facts and figures and cogent analysis – far more than I have the time to delve into – of a rather serious social problem if not many of them. Given all of the many sites that you link to which support the profession and attempt to humanize it in many ways I’m kind of surprised that there isn’t some umbrella organization or group attempting to change the related laws – but maybe there is one that I haven’t run across yet, although I would certainly support it if there is one that you would recommend.
But, in passing, I’m kind of surprised to note that at least the Catholic Church seems to view the holiday as marking the time “after [Jesus’] birth [for] Mary’s ritual purification after childbirth”. Because, dontcha know, sex and childbirth are, as Brigadier General Jack D. Ripper insisted about communism in Dr. Strangelove, part of a “conspiracy to sap and impurify all of our precious bodily fluids”. Somewhat apropos, you might be interested in this related observation by Philip Wylie in his Generation of Vipers on “momism” in general, but more specifically on highly questionable and problematic attitudes towards sex, ones which if not deriving from “religion”, some of them at least, are rather egregiously promoted by it:
But maybe, apparently, we were alluding to prior pagan festivals that, as your initial quote suggested, had and have more rational and credible provenance.
Where I grew up–the Canadian prairies–Groundhog Day is somewhat of a joke, similar in vein to your own view. For us, six more weeks of winter is usually a good thing, because that means an early spring. Persistent snow on the ground and the occasional storm are normal through late April, and low temperatures frequently linger into May.
It’s been weird, alright. I hardly complained about how long it took to turn the A/C on. Well, not much.