May 9

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May 9 carries the weight of the largest military celebration on earth and the whimsy of a holiday for missing laundry. The calendar has range.

On This Date

1945: Victory Day (День Победы) in Russia and many former Soviet states. The ratified German surrender takes effect just after midnight, Moscow time. The celebration is enormous and deeply personal — the Soviet Union lost an estimated 27 million people in the war, the greatest national loss of any combatant. The May 9 parade in Red Square remains one of the largest annual military ceremonies in the world. In Russian families, May 9 is not a holiday about geopolitics; it is about who didn’t come home.

1948: Edwin Land demonstrates the Polaroid Land Camera Model 95, the first commercially available instant camera. The first sale is at the Jordan Marsh department store in Boston. Land’s daughter had asked him, years earlier, why she couldn’t see the photo right away. He spent several years answering her question.

1960: The FDA approves Enovid — the first commercially available oral contraceptive pill — fundamentally reshaping family planning, women’s economic participation, and the social structure of the second half of the twentieth century.

1502: Christopher Columbus departs Cádiz on his fourth and final voyage to the Americas. It will be the worst of the four. He’ll be shipwrecked in Jamaica for a year.

Folk Traditions and Superstitions

In some European folk calendars, the ninth of any month was considered a day of prophetic dreaming. The belief: dreams on the ninth night reveal things that will come true within nine days. The practice was to place a bay leaf under the pillow, go to sleep without speaking to anyone after sunset, and record the dream immediately upon waking. Whether anyone ever validated this system is not recorded.

May 9 falls in the pre-Ice Saints period (see May 8 entry), so the gardening advice holds: plant nothing that can’t handle a late frost. “Sow beans in a flood, they’ll grow on mud” — a proverb for wet-May planting conditions.

Astronomical Notes

By May 9, Scorpius is beginning to appear above the southern horizon in the Northern Hemisphere after dark. Its brightest star, Antares — “rival of Mars,” named for its reddish hue — is a supergiant 550 light-years away with a diameter roughly 700 times that of the sun.

The Strange Bit

National Lost Sock Memorial Day is observed on May 9. It memorializes socks that entered the dryer as a pair and emerged alone. The phenomenon is real: a 2016 Samsung-commissioned study estimated that the average person loses 1.3 socks per month, totaling roughly 1,264 over a lifetime. The primary culprits are static cling (socks hiding in fitted sheets), the gap between the drum and the door seal, and, more prosaically, the laundry basket.

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