Super Bowl Monday.  Whether you were rooting for Seattle, Denver, or merely fulfilled your cultural obligation of watching the commercials, there is a chance you are hung over.  There is a better chance that you are exhausted, and an even better chance that you would love some excuse to be anywhere but at work (even more likely if you were pulling for the Broncos).  Fortunately, a solution is within our grasp.

A Cry for Help

I was listening to sports talk radio a couple of weeks ago when a man called in with a problem.

The desperate man asked: “When is Roger Goodell finally going to move the Super Bowl to Saturday night so that I can get drunk while I watch it?”

The consensus of the show’s hosts, and I agree, is that having the Super Bowl on a Sunday night is far too valuable for the NFL – it’s not going anywhere.  While a Saturday night Super Bowl might be ideal for hardcore football fans, Goodell and the league would lose too many casual viewers with a Saturday night game for such a move to make sense.  The solution, therefore, must come from outside the NFL.  It must come from the People.

Help Us President Obama, You’re Our Only Hope

What I propose is an imperfect solution, but a step in the right direction.  What we need is a Federal Holiday on the first Monday in February.  What we have is a Federal Holiday somewhat arbitrarily assigned to the third Monday of the month – “President’s Day.”

How crass, you might think – to move President’s Day (Officially titled “Washington’s Birthday, although the holiday cannot fall on Washington’s actual birthday of February 22) for the purpose of allowing people to be hung over in peace after watching a football game.  This holiday is about… Presidents or something; this holiday is about… what the hell is this holiday about, anyways?  Well, according to Wikipedia, in the first line of the section on Observances and Traditions of Presidents Day, “Today, the February holiday has become well known for being a day in which many stores, especially car dealers, hold sales.”

We can certainly move that tradition forward on the calendar by two weeks.  The real problem with using Presidents Day as a post-Super Bowl landing pad is that not many people get the day off anymore.  This changed about 25 years ago when evil profit-obsessed corporations tried to convert the holiday into a day for shopping, rather than a day to honor Presidents or whatever.

So what we need Mr. President, is a two-pronged approach.  First, Presidents Day needs to be moved forward by two weeks.  Second, we need to make sure that as many people as possible are able to properly observe the holiday.  We can start properly observing the holiday by drinking like Chester A. Arthur during the game the night before.  Our 21^st President would be so hung over from his Saturday nights that he would need a carriage to help with the one block trip to church on Sunday morning.

When I ran this idea by my wife, a true-believing Obama supporter from six years ago, she bristled at my vision.  “You can’t do that.  It just doesn’t work that way,” she chided me.  How quickly she has forgotten.  2008’s “Yes We Can,” has given way to 2014’s “No We Can’t.”

Mr. President, this is a policy proposal the entire country can get behind.  You are fast approaching lame duck status, and you seem to know it.  In your State of the Union address last week, you said that if Congress does not act on an issue, you will, through use of the Executive Order.

President Lincoln proclaimed the fourth Thursday of November to be a national day of Thanksgiving over 150 years ago, and look what a wonderful celebration of football that day has become for so many Americans today.  Football has given true meaning to Thanksgiving, and it can do the same for Presidents Day.   This is Our Time.  This is Your Legacy.  This is Something Other Than Healthcare Policy for your party to talk about before the midterm elections.  Act in 2014 to move Presidents Day forward two weeks in 2015 and beyond, so that as few of us as possible must spend another Super Bowl Monday at work.