{"id":3634,"date":"2011-02-01T18:12:10","date_gmt":"2011-02-02T00:12:10","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.edgewiseblog.com\/mjh\/the-atheists-pulpit\/happy-candlemas-everyone\/"},"modified":"2011-02-01T18:12:10","modified_gmt":"2011-02-02T00:12:10","slug":"happy-candlemas-everyone","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.edgewiseblog.com\/mjh\/the-atheists-pulpit\/happy-candlemas-everyone\/","title":{"rendered":"Happy Candlemas, Everyone"},"content":{"rendered":"<p><a href=\"http:\/\/www.usno.navy.mil\/USNO\/tours-events\/sky-this-week\/the-sky-this-week-2011-february-1-8\">The Sky This Week, 2011 February 1 &#8211; 8 \u2014 Naval Oceanography Portal<\/a> <\/p>\n<blockquote><p>February 2nd is one of our more popular &quot;semi-holidays&quot;, Groundhog Day. It is similar in character to Halloween in that most everybody is aware of it and &quot;observes&quot; it in some fashion, but they\u2019re not really sure why they do. \u2026 Groundhog day falls mid-way between the winter solstice and the Vernal equinox \u2026 [T]he roots of Groundhog Day date back well over a thousand years to an early Christian feast known as <em>Candlemas<\/em>. This was one of the so-called &quot;cross-quarter&quot; days of ancient timekeeping tradition, which, along with the quarterly seasonal markers, were the dates when serfs paid rent to their feudal lords. Halloween is the other cross-quarter day that\u2019s still widely observed here in America, and Europeans still observe May Day. Lammas, the final cross-quarter day, falls on August 1st, which is the traditional start of summer vacation days in many parts of the world.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n<p><a href=\"http:\/\/www.usno.navy.mil\/USNO\/tours-events\/sky-this-week\/the-sky-this-week-2011-february-1-8\">The Sky This Week, 2011 February 1 &#8211; 8 \u2014 Naval Oceanography Portal<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>The Sky This Week, 2011 February 1 &#8211; 8 \u2014 Naval Oceanography Portal February 2nd is one of our more popular &quot;semi-holidays&quot;, Groundhog Day. It is similar in character to Halloween in that most everybody is aware of it and &quot;observes&quot; it in some fashion, but they\u2019re not really sure why they do. \u2026 Groundhog &hellip; <a href=\"https:\/\/www.edgewiseblog.com\/mjh\/the-atheists-pulpit\/happy-candlemas-everyone\/\" class=\"more-link\">Continue reading <span class=\"screen-reader-text\">Happy Candlemas, Everyone<\/span> <span class=\"meta-nav\">&rarr;<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[13],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-3634","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-the-atheists-pulpit"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.edgewiseblog.com\/mjh\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3634","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.edgewiseblog.com\/mjh\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.edgewiseblog.com\/mjh\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.edgewiseblog.com\/mjh\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.edgewiseblog.com\/mjh\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=3634"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.edgewiseblog.com\/mjh\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3634\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.edgewiseblog.com\/mjh\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=3634"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.edgewiseblog.com\/mjh\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=3634"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.edgewiseblog.com\/mjh\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=3634"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}