If I were a betting man, I’d say a decent amount of you readers are at least going to consider calling in “sick” the Monday after next. If you do, I can’t blame you at all — especially since only the Cincinnati Bengals are tanking harder than my odds to get Super Monday off are now.
I hope your bosses are either cool or take the bait, because coming down with a mysterious (but definitely not made-up, no way) 24-hour bug the day after the Super Bowl is as grand an American tradition as eating latticed apple pie and lighting questionably legal fireworks in your back yard on July 4.
Most every year, there’s some new report making its rounds in the news about just how many billions of dollars in productivity employers stand to lose on Super Monday thanks to diehard football fans, regular folks who just had a few too many adult sodas at the party and everyone in the overlap of that Venn diagram taking the day off. The Washington Post estimated before last year’s game that more than 17 million people were going to take the next day off. I can only imagine the numbers will go up now that the Super Bowl has two likeable, exciting, highly hyped teams competing and none of them are going to give us the “I’m so sick of the Patriots” blues.
In a way, it’s a lot like New Year’s Eve and New Year’s Day. All of the action happens the night before the actual holiday, yet it’s the next day where everyone’s pretty much done celebrating and nothing huge happens, but it’s still a federal holiday. What do you do on New Year’s Day besides recover from an NYE party and remind yourself a hundred times to stop writing “2019” or whatever the previous year was on your documents? I certainly don’t do anything out of the ordinary.
I’m just trying to see Super Monday, the day after one of the most popular singular events in America, get its due as a full-blown holiday.
I don’t even have much of a stake in this! I can count on one hand the number of holidays where I don’t have to work. Super Monday definitely wouldn’t be one of them. I’ve never even been able to not work on my birthday. But I still want this to be a holiday because it just feels right to take the next logical step when you know full well that so many people are going to try to get out of work anyway.
For the record, I’m not on board for doing the same for the Tuesday after the college football national championship. There’s no good reason for the game to be on a Monday night instead of a Saturday, which would give everyone the next day off automatically. Can we at least make that happen?