“Turn your face to the sun and the shadows fall behind you.”

- Maori Proverb

Well, my friends, what can I say, but this is by far the best weekend of the entire year.

We've been waiting all season for this day to arrive and it's finally here. I feel so full of joy I'm almost bursting at the seams. There are the parties, the fanfare, people are cheering and it's just a swell time to enjoy the drama of the unexpected.

Naturally, I'm talking about Groundhog Day.

Don't act so surprised, did you really think I was going to write about some football game? By now I think you know me all too well for that. Seriously though, I do love Groundhog Day, and for the usual reasons that most people do, the cherished hope of an early spring. But this special day also shows what good there is left in this great country of ours. Where else but in America would people gather round a tree stump with a catchy name like Gobbler's Knob, in the middle of Pennsylvania, anxiously waiting for a fat woodchuck, named Phil, to take a stroll.

Groundhog Day is the trifecta of holiday achievements. It has it all for you, the high drama of waiting to see what the surprise ending will bring. A lovable, yet chubby, central character with a funny name. And for all intensions and purposes no real reason for happening in the first place.

If there was ever a question about the duality of mankind this has to be the prime example of being both quaint and stupid at the same time. Sort of like buying those Hummel figurines they sell on QVC, but with more fur, and less Joan Rivers.

Now I understand it's quaint because all of the nation's eyes are focused down on the small hamlet of Punxsutawney as the villagers gather and sing in the time-honored tradition of rodent weather forecasting.

Yet stupid because, as I stated before, you're standing in the middle of Pennsylvania� anxiously waiting for a fat woodchuck, named Phil, to take a stroll. Perhaps maybe these folks have never heard of Doppler radar or can't just go to the window to see if it's stopped snowing yet, but for whatever reason we now have this glorious holiday.

And oh, what I wouldn't do to have been able to be present the day some schlep took it upon himself to go to the government and ask that this obese gopher obsession was finally ratified into an official holiday. I know that our fore-fathers were simple folks but Groundhog Day, seriously? Then again this was in a time before television and they were probably struggling for some entertainment.

The only mystery to this holiday is this: Does Phil actually know what all the commotion is about or does he just assume that every time he wakes up he'll be hounded by the paparazzi? For all we know the other forest creatures might think he's the Britney Spears of the wild, and in a sense, that's exactly what he is. Happy Groundhog Day everybody.

Auburn native, Bradley Molloy's column appears here, each

Sunday, in The Citizen.

He can be reached at lovonian@hotmail.com