Feb 1, 2020 3 min read

It may not be gospel, but the pastor of Bentleyville United Methodist Church credits her father with coming up with a cookie cutter in the shape of Phil, the most famous groundhog in Pennsylvania.

“He invented the cookie cutter and the recipe” for iced sugar cookie groundhogs, the Rev. Barbara Bailey of Washington said Friday of her father, Joseph Morris.

She pegged the date of the cookie cutter’s introduction as post-war.

Morris was from Punxsutawney, but he went to Pittsburgh during World War II to work as a welder, so he was certainly familiar with metal.

Returning to his hometown in Jefferson County afterward, he went back to baking at the family business, the MacKenzie Restaurant and Bakery on Mahoning Street, where he came up with the shadow-seer-shaped treat in profile, sitting on his haunches.

Does a cookie cutter for the weather-forecasting observance mean six more weeks of calories? Phil’s burrow, it seems, was sitting on a goldmine waiting to be discovered.

If only Morris had patented that cookie cutter, because the 1993 film, “Groundhog Day,” put Punxy on the map.

Bailey said Bill Murray, the star of the rom-com, stopped by the MacKenzie Restaurant and Bakery while preparing for his role.

‘My mother and my aunt ran the restaurant, and he talked with my mom (Helen Morris) and Aunt Ruth” MacKenzie.

Although the scenes passed off as Punxsutawney in the production were actually shot in Illinois, there is a restaurant Bailey recognizes as being based on her family’s establishment, with one glaring difference.

The strict Methodist MacKenzies “would never serve alcohol,” she said.

Bailey, in her teens, worked there, too, and the experience, she said, was enough to tamp down any interest she may have otherwise cultivated in the culinary arts.

But she has friends, Keith and Linda Rieder of Waynesburg – also connected to Punxsutawney- who will be baking and delivering woodchuck cookies crafted according to Joseph Morris’ recipe so those who come to Bentleyville United Methodist, 712 Main St., can celebrate at 10:30 a.m. Sunday in style.

“The people at my church were really taken with this idea, and I thought, since it was on Sunday….”

Children of the congregation have already been outfitted with groundhog T-shirts and, Bailey, mixing religion with her roots, will preach a sermon on the topic, “Home and Where It Really Is.”

That man should not live on marmot munchies alone seems to run in her family. Her son, Brian Bailey, baked Joseph Morris’ groundhog cookies for the Ritz-Carlton Hotel in Pasadena, Calif., but he’s now serving a church in Myrtle Beach, S.C., while he studies to be a minister.

Bailey’s brother, Timothy Morris, was a member of the Groundhog Club, and she still has family members in both Punxsutawney and DuBois.

“Since I’m serving a church, I don’t get to go back a lot,” she said.

“I don’t go on Groundhog Day – it’s too crowded.”