It's that time of year again! When some think it is a good opportunity to revere the hedgehog ... Well - I am all for Hedgehog Day - but as I have said before it is a delightful nonsense for two reasons ... the first and most simple is that, as we all know:
EVERY DAY IS HEDGEHOG DAY!
I wrote about the source of this fun in a book on the iconography of the hedgehog. The reasoning is quite sound apart from the fundamental flaw of it being based on something that is not true ...
The story goes that the origins of Groundhog Day - a celebration of the weather predicting qualities of a furry rodent and made quite famous by the brilliant film of the same name starring Bill Murray and Andie MacDowell - is that the colonists of North America brought with them the tradition of Hedgehog Day - but on finding no hedgehogs, co-opted the groundhog!
If the groundhog, known as Punxsutawney Phil, casts a shadow when it is pulled from its burrow there will be another six weeks of winter. Why the groundhog? Well the Pennsylvanian Dutch for the groundhog is dox - and the German for badger is dachs - and there is a European tradition of forecasting based around the badger - in turn based around the Christian festival of Candlemas ... which in turn was used as a measure of the weather, and that if Candlemas was clear, winter would linger.
In the USA, in particular, there is still a crowd of people who keep hedgehogs - NOT European hedgehogs - these were originally from Africa and are either Atelerix albiventris or Atelerix frontalis. They are a wonderfully eccentric bunch and gave me a great time when I visited them at the Rocky Mountain Hedgehog Show (details in A Prickly Affair). This hedgehog world has created a whole series of mythologies about their hedgehogs - including that it was the original Roman tradition of checking in with a hedgehog to see what the weather was going to be like that spread across the Atlantic. Which is lovely. But for which there is absolutely no evidence at all!
But then again, all traditions were made up by someone at some time - so maybe Hedgehog Day will stick? And if we do have a day to pay a little more attention that normal to our prickly friends, there can be not harm in that!
In other news, I found this packet of crisps when tiding up a corner! Who remembers Hedgehog Crisps? And has anyone out there ever eaten a hedgehog - and a Hedgehog Crisp - and able to tell me if there is any similarity in flavour?