February 2, 2022 - National Groundhog Day | National Tater Tot Day

Welcome to February 2nd, 2022 on the National Day Calendar. Today we celebrate weather predicting rodents and striking potato gold. Today is the midway between the start of winter and the spring equinox. It used to be a pagan celebration of the coming of warmer weather. Christians in Europe adopted aspects of this celebration to create Candlemas. One of the traditions associated with Candlemas was the belief that a sunny day meant another 40 days of cold and snow. Germans put their own spin on this tradition, declaring that Candlemas would be considered sunny only if a badger saw its shadow. When German immigrants came to America, they swapped out the badger for a lovable groundhog and—voila!—Groundhog Day was born. Hopefully today is cloudy and Punxatawney Phil will let us know that Spring is about to be sprung! The brothers Nephi and Golden Grigg were farmers barely scraping by during the Great Depression. They made a bold decision to mortgage their home to purchase the frozen foods plant they had rented along the Oregon Idaho border. The Food Company now known as Ore-Ida began producing frozen corn, but Nephi knew the big money was in French fries. The problem was that the equipment used to cut the fries left an abundance of irregular potato bits, which were at first used to feed cattle. Nephi didn’t like throwing away profits and soon devised a way to pack the peelings into tater tots. By 1964 Ore-Ida turned an annual profit of $31 million. On National Tater Tot Day take a tasty bite of the American dream. I’m Anna Devere and I’m Marlo Anderson. Thanks for joining us as we Celebrate Every Day! Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices