Constable: We need holiday after Super Bowl Monday

By Burt Constable

Some of the crowd clamoring for Super Bowl Monday to become a holiday finally got their wish, in a way. On most Sunday nights after the Super Bowl bash, many of us either trudge home from a friend's party or clean up the mess that friends made at our party. We try to get to bed with the knowledge that we have to get up Monday morning and get the kids off to school and get ourselves to work.

Blowing wind and 19 inches of snow gave lots of folks the Monday holiday they have been desiring. Although they probably never imagined spending Super Bowl Monday shoveling sidewalks and freeing cars from drifts.

Still, there is something nice about an unexpected holiday. My family has been celebrating an unexpected holiday for the past eight years.

Our tradition began because of my brother Bill's career working on a television sports crew. Instead of coming home for the traditional family holidays of Thanksgiving and Christmas, Bill always spent those on the road at some college football bowl game. When his TV season ended, Bill really wanted to celebrate a holiday with family, and the next holiday on the calendar was Mom's Jan. 28 birthday.

We are a family that generally celebrates birthdays with small gestures such as a phone call, card or possibly a modest gift. But we decided to turn Mom's 80th birthday into the Super Bowl of holidays.

My wife, Cheryl, booked a fancy restaurant, and my sisters, Sally and Nancy, flew in from the East Coast. We had a wonderful time and spent far too much money - two things my brother loved doing often. Mom loved it.

The next year, my brother and I put together an impromptu birthday bash for Mom at an Indian restaurant. That was fun, too. Bill declared Mom's birthday as his "favorite holiday of the year."

But then Bill was diagnosed with bile duct cancer, and we just never got around to celebrating Mom's birthday for the few years around Bill's illness and death in 2010.

Last year, my sisters and I planned to revive the tradition and celebrate Bill's legacy as part of Mom's birthday. But the polar vortex and a huge storm in New York scuttled their travel plans. Disappointed, we vowed that we would make a splash for Mom's 88th birthday this year, regardless of the weather.

So, my sisters, a brother-in-law and a niece flew into O'Hare from New Jersey on Saturday afternoon. Six hours later, our 88-year-old mom is gushing about the unusual Girl and the Goat menu items such as "chickpea fritters," "pig face" and "duck tongues with tuna and black bean poke, crispy wontons and piri piri." Mom likes the duck tongues, which she says do not taste like chicken tongues.

It's exhilarating to see your 88-year-old mom try things she hadn't in her first 87 years. We reminded each other of that when the out-of-towners' return flight, which promised to get them home long before the Super Bowl, was canceled by our blizzard. We still took comfort in that when their next flight scheduled shortly before the kickoff also got canceled. And again, after we helped dig out neighbors stuck in the unplowed alley and other neighbors helped us when our van got stuck in that same alley on our second trip to O'Hare during the blizzard.

Better to miss Super Bowl XLIX than Mom's Birthday LXXXVIII, we told ourselves.

That mantra came in handy again on Monday, when their flights home were canceled because our storm had moved on to the East Coast, my wife got up at 5 a.m. for a work meeting, my sisters scrambled to get work done remotely, and I started writing this column at home after beginning the morning with a couple of hours of shoveling out our van, which got stuck for the second time in the monstrous snowdrifts in our still unplowed alley.

All very memorable stuff, which is something you want in a holiday. My brother would have relished the fact that a simple dinner turned into an extravaganza. My sisters, brother-in-law and niece hope to get home today, after their unexpected three-day holiday. I hope to get our mom back home to Indiana one night this week.

We're all a bit too exhausted to think about next year's bash for Mom's 89th birthday.

But it really would be helpful if the federal government made a national holiday out of Super Bowl Monday.