Super Bowl Sunday: New American holiday?

For almost every calendar day, there is an observance. Some of these observances are the very definition of obscure (January 26th's Bubble Wrap Appreciation Day, for example, or July 22nd's Health, Happiness with Hypnosis Day, for another), while others are a little more elevated than rest (Arbor Day, anyone?), but the pinnacle of scheduled observances is the holiday.

The Post Office closes for holidays. Banks, government offices and schools shut down, too. And on the big ones -- Christmas, Thanksgiving, Easter -- if the machinery of America doesn't quite stop, it slows to a crawl as most businesses hang out the closed signs, and the bulk of the citizenry stays home.

Another holiday is coming this weekend -- Super Bowl Sunday. I know that it doesn't have an embossed spot on the calendar, but perhaps it should. The Super Bowl has grown in status since the first one was played Jan. 15, 1967, 42 short years ago. It's a major social event -- and unique, too; of all our holidays, it might be the only one that is celebrated around the TV.

Sure, that means it doesn't have the solemnity of Christmas or Easter (or Presidents Day or Labor Day, or even Arbor Day, for that matter), but never mind that -- the Super Bowl stands as a high-water mark in many an American's year (including mine), so calling Super Bowl Sunday a holiday isn't a stretch at all.

In fact, the signs of it being one are everywhere. Commercials are now on the air from morning to night featuring families in matching colors of their favorite teams decorating their homes for the big day. Chipper women set and fill dining room tables, joyous men select and install new video equipment along living room walls, and bright-eyed children gaze on in wide wonder.

Supermarket aisles are festooned with celebratory displays -- a land of plenty, if you will, with plenty more where that came from -- featuring the lush greens and sparkling whites of the gridiron surface crossing with the patriotism-stirring red, white and blue of our national banner.

Bags upon bags of salty pretzels and chips are corralled by pallet-loads of canned soda pop and beer encased in paperboard. Meats from all sorts of livestock are around here, too; rich protein sources, sliced and smoked and dried and cured, sorted by various states of ready edibility. Salsa and queso to the left. Ketchup and mustard to the right.

Plus, if you happen to be in the mood for football-shaped cookies -- or football field-shaped cakes -- well, those are here too.

And all in easy reach, right where you can find them.

The media has swarmed the event -- television, in particular, is packed with coverage. Sports programs are wall-to-wall about who's playing, and the most intriguing storylines about each team. The nightly news programs will certainly at one point or another talk about the economic impact of the event on Tampa, Fla., this year's host city. Syndicated newsmagazines rehash gossip about the players and their families, friends, acquaintances and hangers-on.

There will be debate about the commercials that run during the game; there's already debate about that ones that won't.

Indeed, Sunday television will begin and end with the Super Bowl, even on the channels that aren't carrying it. ABC will air an alternative halftime show, a shortened version of their goofy reality-competition show, "Wipeout," Animal Planet will run another edition of their ever-popular "Puppy Bowl," and QVC will have a show offering merchandise emblazoned with the winning team's logo -- as soon as that's been sorted out on the field, of course.

At the end of Sunday night, fans of either the Pittsburgh Steelers or Arizona Cardinals will be high-fiving each other and celebrating their team's victory (and conversely, consoling each other and grieving the loss), while the rest of the public reaches for the antacid tablets, flips the channels to see what else is on, or totters to bed to sleep off the day.

When all is said and done, carefully prepared decorations will be mussed, family rooms will be in states of distress, left over food and drink will pack refrigerators, and trash cans from coast to coast will be bursting at the seams.

And if that doesn't sound like a holiday, I don't know what does.