Super Bowl Monday - An Idea Whose Time Has Come

Ouuuuuuch...

How were you feeling, this morning?  Yeah - same here.  I've been saying this for years, and now I believe it is time for us, as a nation, to act.  The time has come to make Super Bowl Monday a national holiday.

This holiday, like the day that precedes it, is not just for football fans - although obviously they need it as much as the rest of the country.  Every year, two major cities have significant portions of their workforces call in sick*, or go to work or school exhausted and/or hung-over and - be they the happily-tired fans or the bitterly-tired ones - completely unproductive.  There's also the matter of cleaning up after the riots, and going shopping for new buses and/or police cruisers, in one of the cities, if not both. 

It's not just the cities of the two competing teams that suffer, nor is this wretched day-after effect limited to sports fans.  The Super Bowl is a lot like Thanksgiving.  It's more than a football game.  A large chunk of our population is eating more than it usually does, drinking more than it should and staying up late on a school night.  

This brings me to the heart of my argument in favor of making Super Bowl Monday a national holiday.  Sure, the massive loss of productivity and school/workplace misery of the adult population is reason enough to act, but I want you to think about the children.

That's right, the kids.  If you have young children, it's very likely that they ate a ton of junk food and stayed up way later than they usually do, last night.  Getting them up and processed for delivery to their places of learning was worse today than any other day of their little school year, wasn't it?

And if you're a teacher, not only is it likely that you yourself are feeling the ill-effects of last night, but now you've got these tired, grumpy, unfocused and possibly tummy-achy kids to try to imbue with knowledge.  I don't know what that's like, but it sounds rough.

And if, like me, you don't have children and aren't a teacher, you still have to hear how awful the poor things are to deal with on the day after the Super Bowl.  And yes, before you even start, I have no doubt that hearing about them is NOTHING compared to having to deal with them, today.  It's just another little symptom that's out there doing what symptoms do.

So, my fellow citizens, has not the time come?  Should we not just cut our collective losses and make Super Bowl Monday a national holiday?  I know some will argue that it's too close to Martin Luther King, Jr. Day and Presidents Day.  It's true that it falls right between the two, but think about it - It's the middle of winter in the US.  Parts of the country have snow to shovel, and in every classroom, factory, store and office, people have the flu.  I figure, the more three-day weekends we can squeeze into January and February, the better it will be for everyone.

Super Bowl Monday.  Do it for the children.

* Yes, I called in sick, today - but I wasn't hung-over.  That would probably have been less unpleasant.  :(
         

What's The Rush?

The Christmas-- sorry, -holiday- music has begun.  I think the dedicated 24/7 holiday music channels have already been on the air on Sirius/XM for a week.  The "Black Friday" sales ads have been running for at least that long (more on that later this week).  The Salvation Army ringer was outside our neighborhood grocery store by last weekend, as well.  

Are you sensing a theme, here?  Of course you are.  But this isn't a rant against the steady creep of Christmas-- sorry, -the holidays- backwards, up the calendar toward summer.  No, this is a rant about the fact that it's not just Christm-- the holidays.  It seems that we are jumping the gun on almost everything, these days.  We have to get all the holiday songs played, all the sales sold, all the decorations hung, like, RIGHT NOW!!  Why?  Because we need to get it out of the way of New Year's.  

We'll need to put New Year's behind us by no later than December 27th, because we have to make room for the college football championship, the NFL playoffs, American Idol, Martin Luther King Day (or as South Carolina and Arizona still prefer, "Monday") and the Super Bowl.  And those things better get a move on, because all the Valentine's Day cards and candy MUST be sold by January 24th.  Otherwise, there is a risk that those commercials could intermingle with the Presidents' Day sale ads, which would lead to a new recession.  

I know this stuff doesn't sound like a big deal, but it doesn't take much of it to set off a catastrophic chain of of causality.  If Valentine's Day interferes with Presidents' Day, then Presidents' Day will step on spring fashion, Easter (spring holiday) and March Madness, causing space-time to collapse upon itself, snuffing out the universe.  And if back-to-school season isn't over by July 4th -- well, you don't want to know what would happen.

Obviously I could go on, but I won't.  My point is simple:  what is the rush?  I understand that -the holidays- has become so important to our nation's economy that it warrants more than a week or two of attention.  But is FIVE weeks not enough?  And do kids need to interrupt their summer vacations at the halfway point to shop for school supplies?  How long do these things take?  Must everything be compressed forward in time, a little more each year?  Where's the line?  How much time do we need to spend being prematurely hyper-sold in honor of annual events?  

The answer is simple, yet sad.  We need to spend all of our time preparing for the next thing, and the very second that thing arrives, we need to shift our focus to the next next thing, and so on.  We need this.  We need it because we've been trained to need it.  And we shouldn't complain, because this works for us.  It works.  

Now, if you'll excuse me, there's a pre-Halloween sale at CVS, and I'd better get in line now, or all the frozen turkeys and Whitman's Samplers will be gone.