Every year around this time, the Russian State Duma adopts a law declaring which days in the following year are going to be legal holidays. And, this being Russia, the process is always way more complicated than you’d expect. First, in order to create as many three-day weekends as possible, the lawmakers play around with the weekends themselves. Thus, if a holiday falls on a Thursday, for example, the law will declare Friday a non-working day as well, but in exchange for this, the following Sunday will be made a work day instead, thus creating an “early three-day weekend” out of Thursday, Friday, and Saturday.

Second, there’s the vexing problem of two clusters of holidays close together – in January there’s the New Year (the biggest holiday of the year in Russia for some reason) followed by the Orthodox Christmas a week later, while in May there’s International Proletarian Solidarity Day (now renamed Holiday of Spring and Labor) followed by Victory of the Soviet People over the Germano-Fascist Invaders in the Great Patriotic War (1941-1945) Day nine days later. This one exists because the Red Army disobeyed Stalin’s orders during the Great Patriotic War (1941-1945). The Generalissimo had given explicit instructions that Berlin was to be taken on 1 May, but the plan wasn’t fulfilled on time due to fiercer than expected resistance on the part of the German people who were being liberated.