OUT OF THE BLUE

One thing Americans excel at, regardless of political affiliation: assigning a persona or a product or an event to every month, ostensibly to inform, otherwise for profit.

Is there another reason to glorify a rodent on national TV, on Feb. 2?

February is top-heavy with such occasions, most celebrated by eating specific foods, beginning with Groundhog Day.

Huh?

No, braised groundhog is not on the menu. Then why the fuss? Something about a shadow and the remaining days of winter despite such a wide weather variant from Maine to the Carolinas that its significance is lost, especially in the era when AI does the thinking and people, the heavy lifting.

Next: Abe Lincoln’s birthday, which for ages was correctly observed on Feb. 12. Then the Uniform Monday Holiday Act of 1968 had the effect of merging Abe with George Washington, born on Feb. 22. When the new law bumped George to a Monday, Lincoln inevitably came to join him, anchoring Presidents Day weekend, which made ski resorts positively ecstatic.

Let Congress do the advertising! French onion soup baked in a crock, a skier’s delight, replaced George’s cherry pie. Lincoln wasn’t much on food. Hence the gaunt cheeks and bony fingers. His favorite meal: corned beef and cabbage.

Sorry, Abe. That doesn’t happen ’til March.

No mention of the other two February birthday boys: Ronald Reagan and William Henry Harrison.

Chinese New Year, a moveable feast this year occurring Feb. 17, is a huge deal in big-city Chinatowns. First parades, then multi-course banquets, each food representing a wish for the coming year (including luck and money), are a prized invitation from chefs wanting to thank loyal customers.

Just don’t ask too many questions about ingredients, in this Year of the Horse. Fire Horse, that is.

Oops, we jumped right over Valentine’s Day, Feb. 14. Maybe that’s a good thing, given chocolate has almost doubled in price since Cupid last launched an arrow. Another conflict: Feb.17 is also Mardi Gras, “Fat Tuesday,” a final splurge before the Lenten deprivations. I visited New Orleans just before Lent, in the Cajun-crazed 1990s, and learned to simmer a gumbo, throw together a po’ boy sandwich. Divine and quite different from bread fried in bottom-of-the-barrel lard used up by European peasants.

Then, certain holidays have been mismatched with their modernized versions. I learned that Thanksgiving, a harvest feast, probably originated in October — and seafood, bountiful off the Massachusetts coast, would have been favored over scrawny, flat-chested wild turkeys spit-cooked over an outdoor fire.

But plump lobster meat dipped in butter . . . fantastic. Ditch Butterballs. Make mine a Butterclaw.

February recalls a poignant memory.

My grandparents lived in Greensboro, on Lee Street, in the house where my mother and her brothers were born. That meant fireplaces, a wood stove, one bathroom tacked onto the back, a half-acre garden where Grandaddy grew a winter’s worth of vegetables that Nanny “put up,” along with pears falling from the tree and grapes from the arbor. The southeast side of the house got full, unobstructed sunshine all winter. By late February Nanny’s daffodils poked through the ground and leaned against the clapboards. She would pick a few still in bud, wrap them in damp rags and then a plastic bread bag, secure the bunch in a cardboard box and mail them to me, stuck in wintry Manhattan. Once in water and sitting on the windowsill, buds burst into bloom.

Nanny was gone (followed soon by Granddaddy, who had come to live with us) when the city appropriated their land, knocked down the house, uprooted the pear tree to widen, and in 2013 rename the street Gate City Boulevard. In February I still mourn Nanny’s faithful daffodils, a promise that spring would eventually warm the concrete city where I waited, impatiently, for my reward.