My favorite holiday is February 2nd, Groundhog Day. It's the perfect holiday because there are no expectations of gifts, no putting up decorations or lights…no taking my wife out to dinner. There are no Groundhog cards, no sending flowers, giving candy, holding egg hunts, or wearing costumes. Texas doesn't sell fireworks then, so it's a quiet day. Most years, Groundhog Day falls on a weekday and since nobody outside of Punxsutawney, PA gets the day off, I'm under no pressure to figure out what to do with the extra time off. February has the record for having the largest number of holidays that nobody celebrates with a day off.

Groundhogs are actually woodchucks. Chubby members of the squirrel family and hence…rodents. You can eat them. As a matter of fact, you can eat any part of any mammal with the exception of the liver of a polar bear. (*Trivia question.) In Texas, we don't have groundhogs. We have to live vicariously through small forest animals in northern regions where woodchucks chuck wood and groundhogs ground ground. We have squirrels in Texas but best I can tell they don't come out of their holes and predict the weather. They will eat holes in your house and store acorns and pecans (pronounced pa' cons) until the ceiling collapses from the weight of their stockpile. But, predicting the cost of home repairs isn't really an appealing holiday activity.

We could use some animal native to Texas. After all, relying on the predictions of a groundhog 1200 miles away for Texas weather probably isn't all that accurate. I would choose the Javelina….pronounced Havelina…it is called a "collared peccary" by people who want to take it's picture, it is called Tayassu tejacu or Dicotyles tejacu by people who want to classify it. Hunters call and spell it Havelina. A Javelina is basically a cross between a pig on steroids and a leopard. They live in the Texas Hill Country southwest of Austin and along the Mexican border. Crazy people hunt them with bows and arrows. The basic premise of the sport is to stand in densely wooded areas with your bow and try to shoot the Javelina before it appears out of nowhere and kills you. It's one of the few hunted animals where the ratio of hunter getting Javelina and Javelina getting hunter is about even. So the holiday would basically be, stand in front of the Javelina den with a bow and if the human is merely maimed, spring is just around the corner.

I thought about using the armadillo as the official Texas weather critter but they're slow, they waddle, and arrows bounce off. So, the esthetics for a truly memorable holiday experience just isn't there.

A segue (pronounced seg-way) is a term usually found in music and sometimes used by writers to lead the reader into another subject based on some idea or keyword used in a previous paragraph or sentence. Getting from Groundhogs to hunting Javelinas is known as an awkward segue. Moving from using the meteorological uses of wild pigs to bow hunting ground squirrels requires talent I don't have so I am using this paragraph to make the leap.