Happy Groundhog Day!

It hadn't ever occurred to me that it was especially odd until my nephew's wife wrote about it, but our family has serious Groundhog Day traditions. We didn't grow up doing anything for Groundhog Day, but my sister and her family started doing some Groundhog Day things, and we copied them. For us, Groundhog Day means:

1. Watching the movie. (Sadly without Clearplay equipment this year, we'll be strategically fast forwarding.) There aren't too many movies that survive repeated viewings, but this one does. And I don't even like Bill Murray movies.

2. Eating and throwing pancakes. When we first moved to Louisiana we of course visited museums about Cajun culture. One in Lafayette, had an interpretive panel that talked about a special tradition on Feb. 2 where Cajuns would eat pancakes and throw one on the armoire for good luck. Thinking this had the makings of a great family tradition, I tried to find more information about it in the local public library. I couldn't find anything and the librarians couldn't either, so I telephoned the museum. The curator told me she'd never heard to the tradition and she didn't believe me when I told her I'd read about it in her museum. She took my phone number and called me back about an hour later to tell me that she had, indeed, found the interpretive panel I had described but that she had no idea where the information had come from.

So Cajuns may not throw pancakes, but we do. Every year.


3. Eating ground hog, aka pork sausage. My sister's family's tradition. We will not be participating this year. You can't buy any pork products in Sarajevo.


4. Drinking Houndsgrog, the perfect Groundhog Day drink, David's invention: warm apple cider with scoops of vanilla ice cream floating in it. Of course, we can only get apple juice here, not apple cider, and it's always questionable whether we'll be able to find vanilla ice cream (especially in winter), so we may make do with scoops of strawberry ice cream in warm apple juice. Or maybe we'll just eat them separately.

Happy Groundhog Day!

I love the blog "The Artful Parent" and I loved this interview with the Met's Museum Educator about visiting museums with children.