Punxsutawney Phil will be a virtual star on Tuesday

Around the time the sun rises Tuesday morning for yet another Groundhog Day, Punxsutawney Phil will shake off his sleep and emerge from his burrow at Gobblers Knob, his shadow or lack thereof letting the world know whether we will have to trudge through six more weeks of a gray winter or bask in the sunshine of an early spring.
When Phil creeps out and looks around this year, he might end up thinking, “Hey! Where is everybody?!”
Traditionally, the emergence of Phil and all the festivities surrounding Groundhog Day is the biggest day of the year for the denizens of Punxsutawney, bringing hordes of visitors every Feb. 2 and giving a serious boost to businesses in the Jefferson County borough, located about 100 miles from Washington.
But just as the rituals of Easter, the Fourth of July, Thanksgiving, Christmas and every other holiday have been upended by COVID-19, the pandemic is going to modify how Groundhog Day is marked. Instead of thousands of people descending on the wooded locale outside Punxsutawney that Phil calls home, only a select few members of the Punxsutawney Groundhog Club will be donning top hats and checking in on Phil. The rest of the world will be able to watch Phil’s surfacing when it’s live-streamed at groundhog.org.
“We’re doing the best we can,” said Katie Weaver, a support staffer for the club. The decision was made in November to keep a live audience away from Gobbler’s Knob and make it a virtual event, given the persistence of COVID-19.
Though Punxsutawney is the epicenter of Groundhog Day, it isn’t the only place that has celebrations marking the day. Like their Pennsylvania counterparts, though, most of the organizers of events around North America have opted to present them virtually rather than in-person. In New York, the emergence of the groundhog Buffalo Bert will be online, as will that of French Creek Freddie in West Virginia, Buckeye Chuck in Ohio, and Shubenacadie Sam in the Canadian province of Nova Scotia. Fun runs and marathons set for Groundhog Day will also be carried out online.
Groundhog Day always looms large on the calendar for the Rev. Barbara Bailey, a Washington resident and retired minister at Bentleyville United Methodist Church. A native of Punxsutawney, she was preparing her Groundhog Day cards and postcards last week, acknowledging that “for the people in my hometown, they’ll lose a lot of business” because the coronavirus has put a stop to an in-person event.
How did people ever come to link a groundhog’s shadow to the duration of winter? Pennsylvania Dutch folklore had it that if a groundhog saw its shadow, then it would retreat to its burrow and winter would drag on, but if it did not see its shadow thanks to cloudy skies, then it would be time to start turning our thoughts to spring.