Every family has their holiday traditions. Here in the suburbs of Peoria, it seems like every family has a thing. The Petersons open their Christmas presents at midnight, the millisecond Christmas Eve turns into Christmas Day. The Dahls never have a Thanksgiving feast without this drippy, soggy red cabbage concoction they swear is both delicious (false) and ancestral-history-accurate (maybe), positively swimming in some kind of vinegar; it’s like a cursed form of Scandinavian kimchi. The Lopez girls always show up to Mass on Easter Sunday in the same dress, immaculately sewn by Mrs. Lopez herself. (Not one giant dress; differently-sized versions of the same dress.) Mr. Wagner dutifully sticks little American flags into the lawns (or the snow covering the lawns) of everyone on the block, every President’s Day at 7 am on the dot. Not to be outdone, the Hendersons’ dad (Mark? Greg? Brad?) always requires the whole block—and the whole block is always there because Mr. Henderson’s budget for incendiary patriotism is unrivaled—to sing the entire “Star-Spangled Banner” before he’ll light a single firework. One time he tried to get everyone to sing “I’m Proud To Be An American” and was genuinely surprised when not everyone knew all the words. That tradition didn’t stick.
At our house, Mom somehow glommed onto Groundhog’s Day. Maybe it was the only holiday left. But I like to think she enjoyed owning a smaller-stakes holiday, the fact that she didn’t have to worry that anyone in her book club was gonna show her up on Facebook with their version of the tradition, taking credit for her idea. This was our family’s thing.
And, to her credit, her intuition has been proven right. Nobody else has ever jumped on the bandwagon. Not that we thought anyone would.
Mom’s tradition goes like this: as soon as the sun rises on Groundhog’s Day, Mom will nudge (sometimes drag) the youngest kid—a human stand-in for the actual groundhog—out onto the front lawn (or the snow covering the lawn), right to “the spot”, buck naked. On more wintry Groundhog’s Days, the naked part was especially terrible. But Mom insists the nakedness is more accurate and better honors the noble woodchuck. She keeps an entirely straight face when she says it too.
So then, from the windows, Mom and the rest of us look anxiously (that word working, depending on who’s doing the looking, in all its definitions) for the youngest’s shadow, our own little groundhog weatherperson.
Poor Tyler, our caboose, had to look for his shadow well into high school. Until the State stepped in.
The State wouldn't know a holiday tradition if it bit them on the jack-o-lantern.
The next summer, Mom made Dad build a privacy fence so nobody could snoop on her tradition.
Still somehow, Ms. Jenkins from the state happened to drive by the next Groundhog’s Day morning, just as Mom had opened the front door for Tyler. Mom swore the Fitzpatricks had narced on us in a fit of jealousy.
I did see Tyler whispering into the phone the night before, for what that’s worth.
Tyler still had his bathrobe on when the door opened the next morning, so Ms. Jenkins couldn’t do anything drastic, though her glare seemed pretty drastic to me. But Ms. Jenkins presence alone did stop Mom from making Tyler go outside that time. Mom huffed and turned on the local news to see if the groundhog at the zoo saw its shadow.
It did not.
Which, by tradition, is supposed to mean spring comes early.
It did not.
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