Alright, last post about holidays for a minute. We’ll unveil the next bracket either tomorrow or Friday, and we’ll start voting on it on Tuesday. Just need to handle that unveiling with care, since it’s the state flag one, and we lack care at the moment.
Now.
The last holiday thing.
We didn’t really know what Maslenitsa was when we added it to the bracket, except for that we’d seen it was one of the world’s largest holidays by number of celebrants and that it came from the Slavic parts of the world. Somehow, we didn’t put together that this meant it was a big Russian holiday, but hey—our quarrel is not with the Russian people at large, it’s with their sick, wannabe-conqueror king and his cronies.
We didn’t really know what Maslenitsa was when we added it to the bracket, but we quickly learned, because upon including it in the first round of voting, we received a direct message from a friend (check out bandanna on Spotify, by the way) that said, “PANCAKE WEEK.”
Or something of the sort.
It turns out that Maslenitsa—widely celebrated in Russia, Ukraine, Belarus, and probably some other places over there—is a week of pancakes. Originally a pagan end-of-winter festival, it got lumped in with the last week before Orthodox Lent, when meat isn’t allowed but dairy is, and since pancakes are a good vehicle for butter, Maslenitsa (literal translation is evidently “BUTTER WEEK”) was born.
Are their pancakes the exact same as ours? I don’t know. I don’t think these are straight-up flapjacks, but they don’t appear to be potato pancakes. There’s flour involved. Also I think it’s just a happy coincidence that “NIT” is in the name and this usually happens a few weeks before the NIT starts. But maybe it’s not a coincidence. Maybe Ukraine likes the NIT and Russia hates it and Belarus wants to like it but they’re too far under Putin’s thumb. There is no way to know.
