Time until Groundhog Day

Groundhog Day is 2 February, when Punxsutawney Phil is brought out in Pennsylvania and a shadow is said to mean six more weeks of winter. The custom arrived with German settlers and attaches to Candlemas, an older marker of the midpoint between the winter solstice and the spring equinox. Its forecasting record is no better than chance. The date is fixed and it is not a public holiday, so this countdown rolls straight to next year once 2 February has passed.

The event itself is short and very early. The ceremony at Gobbler's Knob takes place around sunrise, which means visitors arrive in the middle of the night, and the town fills well beyond its usual size. Other towns run their own versions with their own animals, and the predictions frequently disagree with one another in the same year. The 1993 film attached the phrase to the idea of a day repeating, and that meaning is now more widely known than the custom, which is worth remembering before naming a recurring meeting after it. Because 2 February is also Candlemas and a marker of midwinter, several European weather sayings attach to the same date with no animal involved. Nothing closes, and in most of the world the date passes without comment.

Canada runs versions of its own, with Wiarton Willie in Ontario and Shubenacadie Sam in Nova Scotia, and their verdicts are announced within the same hour as Pennsylvania's. In Germany the older form of the custom watched a badger rather than a groundhog. France and Belgium keep the same date as Candlemas and mark it by eating crepes, with a coin held in one hand while the first is flipped. The arithmetic people get wrong is the six weeks: counted from 2 February they end in the middle of March, before the equinox rather than at it, so even a shadow does not stretch winter to the astronomical date.

The next one falls on Tuesday, 2 February 2027, and this page counts down to the midnight that starts it in whatever time zone your browser reports.

The ceremony has been run since 1887 by the Punxsutawney Groundhog Club, whose Inner Circle appear in top hats and read the verdict from a scroll. The club maintains that there has only ever been one Phil, sustained by a drink called the elixir of life, which is part of the joke rather than a claim anyone is asked to believe. The burrow at Gobbler's Knob is a stage set: the animal lives in a climate-controlled enclosure at the town library for the rest of the year and is carried out for the morning.

Attendance went from a few hundred to tens of thousands after the 1993 film, which was shot mostly in Woodstock, Illinois rather than in Punxsutawney. Verdicts have been recorded since the 1880s and lean heavily towards a shadow, which would mean a long winter in the large majority of years. Checked against the temperatures that followed, the hit rate comes out at about what chance would give, and the other towns running the same ceremony with their own animals frequently announce the opposite result within the same hour.