Today, as you prepare your enchiladas and brats, consider this: Super Bowl Sunday is really the last holiday in America’s prolonged interdenominational, generic Holiday Season. This season begins on Thanksgiving, and includes Hanukkah, Kwanzaa, that conjoined celebration of God and Mammon, Christmas, the Nobody Does Any Work in the Week After Christmas Week, New Year’s Eve and New Year’s Day, Martin Luther King Day—and, finally, Super Bowl Sunday, the last excuse to have a big party until Memorial Day. And of all of these days, Super Bowl Sunday is really the holiday for guys. At their heart, Thanksgiving and Christmas are all about feminine values and virtues—home, hearth, family, children, giving, cooking, baking, decoration, pretty packages, large demonstrations of love—and it’s a beautiful thing that we have them. Not for nothing is this season the culmination of the year, a time of peace and reflection, a time of gratitude and cherishing fundamental values. But let’s face it: after awhile, enough is enough. So men have developed a holiday devoted to guy enthusiasms— wearing loud, brightly colored jerseys (and, when appropriate, pig snouts, Viking horns, cheeseheads, and similar ugly and ridiculous accessories); eating high-fat, high-calorie, high-cholesterol foods; drinking excessively; gambling excessively; and shouting such manifestly un-Christmasy things as “Kill him!” Throw in color guards, Air Force flyovers, half-dressed cheerleaders, funny beer ads, and a big bucket of statistics for the more bookish fellows, and even if a giant erect penis is not wheeled out (as happens at festivals in places even less subtle than America), the ads for Cialis and Viagra make the point: This is Guy Day, and women should indulge us.
But ladies, don’t worry: Valentine’s Day, the holiday of romance and extortion, lies just around the corner.
(This post was exerpted from my review of a new book by Allen St. John called The Billion Dollar Game: Behind-the-Scenes of the Greatest Day in American Sport—Super Bowl Sunday, which appears in the latest issue of The Washington Monthly. To read the full review, click here.)