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Kristin Catherwood, Intangible Cultural Heritage Development Officer

It’s a new year, a time of transition. We make resolutions, vow to do away with the bad habits of last year, pledge to “turn over a new leaf.” We look to what the year ahead might have in store for us. And sometimes, we try to discover that information through methods of divination.

A popular one which makes the media rounds this time of year is the pig spleen forecast. Soon enough, we will hear about Punxsutawney Phil and Wiarton Willy and all the other groundhogs who will supposedly predict when spring will arrive. Stories like these are broadcast on the news and written about in newspapers, like this recent article in The Globe and Mail about a Tompkins, Saskatchewan’s prognosticator.

The tone of these stories is almost always tongue-in-cheek. It’s all a bit of good fun, and no one takes it very seriously. There is always talk of where the traditions supposedly came from, and the murkier and further back in the long ago and faraway past, the better. But rarely in discussions about these earthy prophecies are there any remarks about why these predictions are made in the first place. So perhaps reading pig spleens originated in Sweden. But why has the custom persisted here in Saskatchewan to this day?

Perhaps the answer is so obvious that it’s not worth talking about. It is this way with many aspects of our living heritage, these bits of intangible cultural heritage, this folklore that weaves in and out of our daily lives. We do it a lot, and we talk about it even more, but we don’t often think about its meaning in our lives, or its importance. We don’t always contemplate what our traditions and customs say about who we are.

This past summer while leading a "Discovering Local Folklore" workshop in Shaunavon, I learnt about two methods of divination from a questionnaire I use to draw out local examples of folklore. One of the questions asks about tradition bearers who are known for being able to tell the future in some way. The workshop participants knew of several examples; most were concerned with predicting the weather. I wrote in detail about two New Year’s divining customs on my own blog here, but the gist is that on New Year’s Eve, some folks would lay out twelve walnut shells filled with water, or twelve little dishes made of onions filled with salt, and go to bed. In the morning, the first of the new year, they would check to see how much water was in each walnut shell or onion dish.  Each one represented a month of the coming year, and the amount of liquid predicted the precipitation each month would bring.

These examples sparked discussion about other examples: counting how many cow calves versus bull calves – more females meant a wet year, more males a drought. One doesn’t have to look far to find this – we use nature all the time to tell us something about the future. When muskrats build their lodges in the fall in various sloughs and wetlands across the countryside, we judge the severity of the coming winter based on their size. Last March, an elderly farmer told me had seen some returning Canada geese. “That means we’ll have three more snows ‘til spring” he told me, with conviction.

Why do we do this? The simple answer is quite straightforward. Because the weather is important to us. That goes without saying. But why is it so important to us? What does our preoccupation with predicting the weather say about who we are and the place in which we live? I’ll leave the answers to you.

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