Why the Day After the Super Bowl Should Be a National Holiday

It’s a hell of an idea. And I’ll tell you why.

As we speak, my stomach is fighting a battle as fierce as the one Ray Lewis battled last night. Microbrews combined with chicken wings combined with guacamole equals a bad time. My head is foggy, as unreceptive to doing work as Chris Culliver is to gay teammates.

I’m not alone.

You’re likely feeling it, too. So are your classmates and co-workers. Even Bev from accounting, who couldn’t tell you what a touchback is to save her life, is dragging.

Super Bowl Sunday is not a sporting event. It’s a cultural phenomenon. Hell, my mother texted me with her best power-outage joke last night. It was not funny at all, but still. No singular event is as collective an experience as football’s biggest game. It’s less the culmination of the NFL season as it a carefully constructed conduit to sell tortilla chips, smart phones, and automobiles.

We band together to watch, to bet, to eat, and to drink too much. That’s just what you do. It’s like Christmas—if you spent Christmas with people you actually liked.

And for that bit of fun and revelry, we pay a price. Invariably, we wake up Monday with hangovers, overstuffed bellies, and, depending on how wild things got, more than a few regrets.

Asking us to schlep off to our jobs or classrooms precious hours after state-sponsored hedonism is an unreasonable request.

We’ve shown that, as a country, we can’t handle it.

In 2011, GoPetition.com estimated that 1.5 Americans didn’t show up for work Super Bowl Monday and another 4.4 million moseyed on in late. Anyone thinking the punctual ones operate at normal productivity levels are dreaming. Instead, they’re checking how much money they won or lost on prop bets, re-watching Beyoncé’s halftime performance, or catching up on the Puppy Bowl around water coolers.

It’s time we were rewarded for our laziness and undisciplined focus.

So how do we make this a reality, considering the fact this time of the year is already rife with paid days off?

Simple. We co-opt Presidents’ Day.

UPDATE: Apparently people are already on this.

That’s right. We should observe Presidents’ Day and Super Monday concurrently. My gut tells me neither George Washington nor Abraham Lincoln would particularly care. In fact, if the day contained some guttural “HELL YES, AMERICA” undertones, they’d see it as an honor.

These two already share a day. As they say: two’s a crowd, three’s a party.

And what else is the Super Bowl but a celebration of the tenants of Americanism? Think about it. It combines all our loves – from overeating to boozing to sports to unchecked materialism to prepackaged entertainment to pretending to care—in one magnificent jamboree.

As it stands, the petition needs nearly 84,740 more signatures by Feb. 23 to reach its goal.

We must band together to be the change we want to see in the world. We can make this happen, you guys.

After all, it’s a change we can all believe in.