The long, SAD wait for spring

Last year, the Adolph Coors company took ownership of the phrase, “Mondayest Monday,” to describe the day after the Super Bowl. For many, that’s probably a good descriptor. Statistically, a 2025 UKG survey found that an estimated 22.6 million U.S. employees planned to miss work on the Monday after Super Bowl LIX — up from about 16.1 million the previous year, a nod to how the post-Super Bowl Monday has become synonymous with exhaustion, distraction, and a collective lack of enthusiasm for the workday ahead.

Another candidate for that moniker might be the first Monday of the new year. It may top Super Bowl Monday as the Mondayest Monday of all. By then, the holiday hoopla has collapsed in on itself. Decorations need to be boxed, credit card statements arrive with alarming punctuality and the vague promise to address important matters “after the holidays” comes due. For businesses, it is often the quietest stretch of the year, when revenues stall, phones ring less often, and attention turns inward toward budgets and expense-cutting. The calendar does not coddle. Productivity is expected.

That expectation arrives just as the holiday calendar goes strangely blank. After New Year’s Day, there is a long stretch in which nothing appears with the combined force of anticipation, tradition and disruption. Valentine’s Day makes a brief appearance but is emotionally narrow and unevenly celebrated. Presidents’ Day exists mostly on paper unless we work in government or education. St. Patrick’s Day helps, but by then it feels more like a proxy for spring than a true winter interruption. From early January to mid-March, there is no holiday that reliably resets time the way Thanksgiving or Christmas does.

Winter, however, finds ways to improvise its own observances. Long-term climate averages suggest McCook can expect roughly half a dozen more snow events before spring, with a couple likely to be storms meaningful enough to inhibit travel.

In a season otherwise defined by sameness, even bad weather becomes a kind of holiday. Schools close. Band kids earn trip money by shoveling snow, marginally cutting into landscapers’ off-season side hustle. Meanwhile, EMTs receive hands-on refresher training on the defibrillator when older residents insist on shoveling their driveways as if they were still 40.

All of this unfolds against the backdrop of seasonal affective disorder (SAD), which sounds psychological but is really astronomical. The Earth tilts about 23.5 degrees on its axis, just enough to shorten days and thin sunlight in winter. That modest shift away from a sun sitting a mere 93 million miles away disrupts the production of serotonin, melatonin and vitamin D, leaving otherwise rational adults convinced by mid-January that everything is pointless and the sofa is a viable long-term residence.

The remedies are not glamorous, but they are effective. Vitamin D supplementation can help restore a baseline that winter quietly erodes. Consistent sleep schedules matter more now than in summer. Light should be used deliberately, especially in the morning. Even the tired advice to “go outside” works better when reframed as mechanical rather than poetic: a short walk after sunrise reminds the brain what day it is.

Spring will arrive when it is ready. Until then, the calendar offers few favors, the weather provides occasional distractions and the first Monday of the year retains its claim as the Mondayest Monday. The best response is not resignation, but modest defiance—enough light, enough motion and enough routine to get through another week until the next unofficial holiday arrives, which may present itself in the unlikely form of a blizzard.