Bizarre Culture

Have you ever seen an image of someone you don't recognise, only to figure out after a few milliseconds you're looking at a picture of yourself, just slightly out of context? It's rare, but it happens sometimes, and I always find it instructive to see myself as a stranger would, even just for a minute.

Today, on Groundhog Day, it happened again, not to me personally, but to me as a Canadian. I was thunderstruck by the sheer weirdness of Groundhog Day.

The whole thing is just a silly tradition and we don't actually set any stock by it. But imagine if you were new to the country and couldn't tell the people up early and out in the cold for the prediction were anything other than deadly serious. What if you couldn't tell it was all tongue in cheek? What would you think?

I would think these were a very silly people indeed, happy or not about a long-term weather forecast based on whether a furry, buck-toothed rodent (an albino one in the case of Wiarton) sees or fails to see sunshine on a particular morning.

From a distance, it's very odd, and we rarely acknowledge that it's not what it might appear to be. Which makes me think we might not really understand some of the practices we might ridicule in other cultures, because they may not be what they appear to be from the outside, either.

Although, with the trial of the Shafia family just concluded, when it comes to bizarre cultural practices, I'll take the groundhogs every time, thank you very much.