Another February Holiday Would be Super
If Marvel can make billions by giving us Captain America with Thor’s hammer, surely America can survive giving us Super Bowl Monday off.
I’m only ever sad when I’m left alone with my thoughts for longer than two seconds. Thankfully, our modern world is full of smartphones you can bring into the shower with you, so I don’t have to walk around in the Upside Down of my own head all that often.
But, on those rare occasions that sadness does find me, I have a never-fail method to get me back on the express train to Happy-Town: watching YouTube videos taken in the theater during the opening weekend of Avengers: Endgame, when Captain America uses Thor’s hammer for the first time.
(I’d put a spoiler alert here, but if you haven’t seen Avengers: Endgame, I can only assume you’re just now coming out of a 10-year coma and, honestly, you should put down this article and reconnect with your friends and loved ones. A lot has changed since 2016.)
It’s a great scene, with Mjölnir (pronounced by pressing your lips together and making whatever noise you feel like) being knocked from Thor’s hand during his battle with Thanos and skittering to the ground. Then, it hovers in the air for just a few heartbeats, making you think it’s being called back to Thor, when, boom, pow, zap, it comes flying into Captain America’s hand.
Audiences worldwide went nuts when this happened. It was the movie equivalent of a World Cup goal, with people cheering and stomping with delight. If I’m scrolling TikTok and a video taken inside of a theater during this moment pops up, I’ll stop whatever I’m doing, even if I’m in the middle of a crosswalk, and watch the whole thing.
The thing that Marvel figured out was that making the cool thing that everybody wants to happen, y’know, actually happen, turns out to be good for business. We all thought it would be gnarly to see Cap fight with Thor’s hammer, Marvel said, “OK,” and the result was a couple of billion dollars and kids around the world pretending to be an unfrozen super soldier from World War II fighting an armored space hippopotamus with a mythical Norse God’s magic lightning hammer. That is what humanity is on this planet to do!
So, if doing the obvious cool thing makes everybody happy, then the next logical question is this: Why isn’t the Monday after the Super Bowl a national holiday!?!
February has three holidays of note: one where we pretend a rodent can forecast the weather, another sponsored entirely by the diamond and flower industrial complex, and a third where we celebrate presidents by putting mattresses on sale. February is a 28-day, icy zombie crawl from the snow of January to the sleet of March, and it needs another holiday, something bright and joyful to celebrate, just to make it livable.
Super Bowl Sunday is already sitting right there, golden, like a deep-fried onion, waiting for us to elevate it from de-facto holiday to actual holiday.
Some would say that football doesn’t have the necessary gravitas to become a holiday, and, while I might agree with that if we were in some other, dignified, country, this is America we’re talking about here. What better way is there to celebrate the values that made this country great than by eating a plate of nachos the size of a hubcap and then punching the TV when our parlays don’t come through? Mom and apple pie have nothing on the Super Bowl.
Plus, we all remember what it was like last year when the Birds won, having to drag ourselves to work Monday morning, hung over, covered in fresh wounds from a night spent shimmying up street lights to hang Eagles flags, and exhausted after shouting “E-A-G-L-E-S” at random cars from an overpass. A Monday to recover would have made all of us breathe a little easier—as well as given our lawyers time to think up some alibis for us.
If you’re worried that we already have too many holidays, then all we’d need to do is add another bye week, pushing the whole season back a week, and put the Super Bowl on the day before President’s Day. I’d gladly wager a pinky finger that the average American can name more NFL teams than they can name presidents, especially the post-Lincoln, pre-Roosevelt duds of the late 19th century. Give me the Cleveland Browns over the Grover Clevelands any day of the week!
We all know the Golden Rule, so let’s call this the Silver Rule: try to do the coolest thing possible whenever you can. And, America? It’s time to call Mjölnir and make Super Bowl Monday a holiday!
