Seasons Greetings

Happy Groundhog Day. Or "seasoned greetings", as we sometimes say in our tribe. In my family of origin, Groundhogs day always had a festive feel to it. The traditional food for GHD is biscuits and sausage gravy, what else. What a wonderful way to start an otherwise dreary winter day. The kitchen would be hot from the oven and the smell of the gravy wafting from the big black iron skillet would have lifted the spirits of Job. There would be plenty of biscuits for butter and homemade apple butter or strawberry rhubarb jam. With a breakfast like that and you want to do it every morning, just like in Bill Murray in the Groundhogs Day movie.

My family has a custom of celebrating the second of February as a special day. Ledged has it that it started with my mother and her aunt Maud about 90 years ago. They would make greetings cards and each would try to be the first to wish each other "Seasons Greetings". Growing up, we kids got into the act and we often made cards. I remember going on a commando mission, sneaking across the back yards the night before to stick a "Seasons Greetings" card in my great aunts front door to be found early the next morning.

I don't remember ever thinking too much about whether the ground hog saw his shadow or not. We really knew that was nonsense and no matter what the ground saw or didn't see, we were going to have six weeks or 42 more days of winter.

This morning we has a large skillet of ground hog gravy and a pile of hot biscuits with butter and homemade applesauce on the side. And as was to be expected, my oldest son called to offer holiday salutations. While we were chatting he commented on the absurdity of the PITA's pathetic protest of the prostituting of Punxsutawney Phil, the ground hog and wanting to replace him with a mechanical robot. Get outta here. Phil, the pampered marmot from Punxsutawney, PA. is one of the most pampered critters around. He has the life of a fat house cat and he only has to "work" for five minutes a year. How unethical is that?

My son brought up something that I had not considered. He said, "Aren't these folks supposed to be "Green" and into the environment? How do they square the idea of replacing Punxsutawney Phil, a warm blooded furry critter, with a robot?" The mechanical replacement would require countless hours of research and development, the use of precious materials that are needed elsewhere. Think of all the diodes, sensors, servo motors and microchips that would be required not to mention the environment damaging batteries. In their haste to save Phil from his life of leisure and security, they neglected to do an environmental impact study. I'm sure that now that Groundhogs day is past they will get around to it.

These air-heads PITA nut jobs seem to go totally bats when they think that someone is having fun. If there is a critter involved they get so steamed up that their brains squirt out their nose like milk bubbles. They don't make any sense and seem to only be content if they can piss on someone's parade. Don't get me wrong, I like animals a lot. I even have been known to love a few of them, but I have always been able to tell the difference between a critter and a human being. I need to cool down now and go put some left-over biscuits in the microwave and heat up the left-over gravy, yummm.