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| Foxboro, MA |
On almost any other weekend, a 6:30 PM Sunday kickoff time for the Patriots playoff game would be a serious socioeconomic disaster.
People love the Patriots, the game might run through 10 PM, they serve beer at football games and even at football parties, most people have to be back to work on Monday, and you can kind of do the math.
Your workers will be hung over, the students will be sleepily distracted, and Monday will be useless for much of New England. It should be a Recovery day by any metric I can think of.
It's a shame that there isn't a holiday on Monday.... oh wait, there is!
Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. Day, a celebration of civil and nonviolent disobedience, is January 19th, the day after the NFL conference championships.
That's right, kids... we have us a day off on Monday. You are now secret agent #008, and you have a license to binge. This is good, because you can't even start celebratory drinking until about 9 PM in a best-case scenario of a Pats blowout.
It's not just the drinking. People also binge-eat during football. During last Sunday's entertainment, myself, two brothers, and 2 or 3 other dudes consumed 3 large pizzas, an order of teriyaki wings, an order of buffalo chicken fingers, a giant bag of tortilla chips with a pile of salsa, a package of Chips Ahoy, a tray of seven layer dip, 12 Marylou's coffees, a randomly-cooked and needless pound of bacon, a bag of Skittles, a box of mini Charleston Chews, several grams of vaporized hash oil, a dozen donuts, a quarter ounce of Sour Diesel, a case of beer, 4 cans of whipped cream-flavored nitrous oxide, two packs of Marlboros, and probably some other stuff that I'm forgetting.
That's some conspicuous consumption, and it takes more than 8 hours of sleep to recover from it. Our totals would be even worse if we had some heavy drinkers among our numbers, or some really fat guys. I was the biggest person there, and I'm a lanky 235. We are also not at all unique among Patriots fans, and I may even say that we were a bit more restrained than the average New England football party last Sunday.
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| Just in case you thought we were kidding about the Marylou's... |
This brings to mind a greater question. The scenario I painted above is for a conference semi-final game, which is sort of like the NFL's quarterfinals. Important, but also paling in comparison to the Super Bowl.
The Super Bowl also has a 6 PM start, and features the same over-consumption that my friends and I took part in last weekend. The difference in this case is that the celebration will be a national one, not just a regional one. Throw in the fact that many non-fans will go to Super Bowl parties and watch the entire game, and that more than cancels out the fact that only two cities out of fifty states will have a dog in this fight.
There is no national day of rest after the Super Bowl, and there should be.
Martin Luther King Jr. was a great man, and it is right that we celebrate his birthday. Not a lot of people get their own holiday. It is held on the third Monday of January, which is sort of close to MLK's January 15th birthday.
George Washington was also a great man, and we have a sort of holiday dedicated to ol' Dollar Face and his five dollar friend, Abe Lincoln. Presidents Day is tentatively set between the birthdays of Washington and Lincoln, on the third Monday of February.
The floating holiday thing opens up a loophole for the forward-thinking man. If we're honoring MLK, George and Abe and not their birthdays, why shouldn't we have some wiggle room as to when we celebrate their lives?
George or MLK are going to have to make a sacrifice between them, for the greater good of the America that they strove to protect and perfect. I'm thinking George, but MLK supporters will have some good arguments for their side.
Before we get to that, we have a few problems to solve. OK, some are more along the lines of "mitigating factors."
- The way it works now... Christmas/New Year's is the big holiday season.... you get a few weeks back at work before MLK Day... you do another month and get February Vacation.... then you do a long push before Easter.
- MLK Day does not occur during Black History Month. This could be viewed as a positive, with MLK Day sort of giving the already-short Black History Month a running head start. But it also is a conspicuous void.
- There is some debate as to whether the February holiday is really President's Day or Washington's Birthday. A lot of the red states don't like to celebrate the birthday of the Great Emancipator.
- Schools take a week's vacation during the middle of February, between Washington and Abe's birthdays. President's Day usually falls into that period, giving the parents a day home with the kids.
- There will be many people who will get Furious if you try to alter the celebration of either man's day.
- Feminists would note that "giving women the right to vote" may eclipse any of Dr. King's accomplishments, and wonder why Susan B. Anthony only gets an obscure collector's coin when people are throwing holidays around.
- There is some sentiment to make September 11th a holiday, which would add to the holiday pool.
- Speaking of that pool, why don't the Native Americans have a day?
- How about cops/firefighters/EMTs? I kind of grade emergency responders around the same as soldiers on the deserves-some-honor-for-bravery scale. While we're on the topic, what about Nurses? Teachers?
- An even better argument can be made for establishing a holiday on Election Day. That one gets proposed with the frequency.
- Dr. King and George Washington led very important lives, perhaps two of the greatest American lives. Their birthday celebrations should be somber, especially that of the man who worked for peace only to die of violence. It may be poorly received when I suggest moving these solemn and hallowed dates to accommodate the binge-drinking associated with a game where a bunch of giant children chase a rubber ball around.
- Depending on when you celebrate Easter, March/April, June and August don't have holidays. March has St. Patrick's Day, which is more of a feast day.
- Ironically, the only birthday celebration we could really move without straying too far from the established birthday would be the unknown one which we would never be allowed to move, that of Jesus.
- Rhode Island still celebrates VJ Day.
- The Super Bowl is usually held early in February.
- There is fierce debate regarding the possibility of extending the NFL regular season by 2 weeks, which would, in theory and assuming they keep the same amount of preseason games, push the Super Bowl into the period where we now celebrate February Vacation.
- When you start moving the Super Bowl back, you set up a potential confrontation of planet-shattering force, and one I have written about before.... the Super Bowl being played on St. Valentine's Day.
- If you push the NFL back into March, you run the risk of serious competition from March Madness.
- People who have sentences in their story about smoking vaporized hash oil shouldn't also speak sentences with "I think that Martin Luther King or George Washington would have wanted this," but I do think that Martin Luther King and George Washington would have wanted their celebrations to make people happy. I bet MLK watched a bit of NFL, IMHO.
- There is a proposed Susan B. Anthony holiday, aimed at the third Monday of February. Would the feminists side with the beer-drinking football slobs if it meant steering that holiday closer to, say, a certain championship game?
- If you are, say, writing an essay on the matter and over-thinking it.... once you move one holiday, there is both the temptation and perhaps the need to start moving several of them.
OK, let's skip the nonsense and start re-arranging the calendar.
Christmas stays where it is, even though it is the most randomly-chosen date ascribed to a holiday other than Veteran's Day and Memorial Day. It would also be tough to move New Year's Eve, short of altering our orbit around the sun.
I feel badly for the feminists, and feel strongly about Election Day. Why not have Bofe? Let's give Suffrage Day the Tuesday after the first Monday in November. This would be an 11/2-11/8 range, and it should increase voter turnout.
Election Day would be wayyyy too close to Veteran's Day, which- to be honest- is way too close to Thanksgiving. I propose giving the Veterans an early August holiday. Instead of a cold November day at the cemetery, I have now given America a second 4th of July... just in August. You're welcome.
I can do 9/11 Day, but it means moving Labor Day back into April. April might be a better day to get off than a September one, as it gets the outdoor workers inside for a winter day. I'm a journalist, so I can't say whether construction workers would rather have a hot day off of work or a cold one. A great part of me thinks that Labor Day should be aligned with either the first day of March Madness or baseball's Opening Day.
Flag Day, which is more of a day of Observance than a holiday, sort of has June locked down.
Now, things get awkward. MLK Day is rather close to Christmas. However, moving it towards the Super Bowl would make for a long holiday drought. There would be outrage. I say that Martin stays where he is.
President's Day? Make it the third Monday of February. It falls within the school vacation week, and it saves us from having to move MLK Day. We seem to be moving a lot of holidays around in this scenario, and some stability would be nice.
The Super Bowl should be aimed at the Sunday before President's Day, even if that means moving the Super Bowl back, expanding the regular season, or expanding the playoffs. If they are going to push all of those beer and food commercials on us while keeping us up to 11 PM (and then setting many of us loose upon the roads), they should hire a few sharpies to make sure that everything synchs up.
Putting the Super Bowl on this date also avoids the potential catastrophe of the Super Bowl falling on Valentine's Day. The week off before the Super Bowl should be set to Valentine's Day.
Doing so also creates revenue for the NFL, as adding to their schedule fills stadiums, sells ad space and so forth. It fills dull winter weekends for meaningless-life sports fans. It lessens the time between the Super Bowl, which is the end of the football season, and the onset of free agency and the NFL Draft, which is the beginning of the next season.
In the end, you'd have this nice Halloween/Election/Thanksgiving/Christmas/NYE/MLK/Valentine's/Super Bowl run into school vacation that would keep the people happy and prevent them from eventually eating the rich.
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