Beware of the shadow
<p>JEROME A. POLLOS/Press Del Gittel inspects the new lights he installed on the plywood groundhog that he's been displaying in his front yard of his Coeur d'Alene home for the past 20 years. What started out as a joke, has now prompted the Gittel family to celebrate Groundhog's Day every year with the display and a dinner.</p>
COEUR d'ALENE - If holidays and other cool days were a sports team, Groundhog Day would probably be the towel boy.
Not exactly the star.
Today is Groundhog Day, by the way, and admit it, you needed reminding.
Fourth of July has sun and explosions, Christmas has gifts, Easter, eggs, and good golly, even St. Patrick's Day has turned into quite the celebration.
Groundhog Day?
Three thousand miles away in a town that's difficult to spell, a Pennsylvanian groundhog by the name of Phil comes out of a log or something to see if it can see its shadow - which is to say: 'Is it overcast or not?'
Not exactly riveting.
But wait a minute.
"Groundhog Day is my favorite," said Del Gittel, of Coeur d'Alene, who has been celebrating the day for around 20 years. "The neighbors get a laugh out of it."
That's right, for two decades Gittel has marked the nearly-inconspicuous day with a yard decoration of a wooden groundhog yelling or yawning to announce the day.
"It's a big joke in our family," the retired barber and Coeur d'Alene native said, laughing at the cutout as he set it up in his yard on Wednesday. "I don't know how it started."
As best as family members can recall, Del just decided to start liking Feb. 2.
Probably because nobody else cared about it, probably because he felt bad for the holiday benchwarmer.
"'Groundhog Day is my holiday,'" daughter Sandie Husby, now living in Massachusetts, remembers her father began declaring. "He just started saying that."
So family members encouraged him. Sandie sent him stuffed animals of the critter and Del's daughter-in-law, Sherri Gittel, an art teacher at Woodland Middle School, made him the wooden cutout.
So yeah, it's mostly a joke. But it's a joke that has become tradition.
"We haven't named it yet," Del said of the cutout, which spends the rest of the year in his basement. "You'd be surprised the cars that come by and stop."
Del has lights around the cutout to make it Christmas-like for passersby, who double take as they drive down the 500 block of South 12th Street.
"My daughter just loves it," said Michelle Dusbabek, a neighbor of Del's for five years, who forgot the day was fast approaching until the decoration came out. "It's just kind of a tradition every year."
Every good holiday needs a tradition too, so Del and his wife, June, cap off the day with a standard dinner of sauerkraut and sausages every year.
Why kraut and sausages?
Well, the day's tradition - where Phil leaves his burrow at Gobbler's Knob at 7:20 a.m. Punxsutawney time as memorialized by the 1993 Bill Murray movie - does have German roots.
But in Del's words: "If you're going to be crazy, might as well go all out."