Long weekends are good. They need not be too long to be good. A workday off on a Friday makes a weekend a long weekend. Though it's just a single-day addition to the regular two-day weekend, the quantum of relaxation and creativity it brings is more than 33%. You could go on a long drive to the beach and have fun. Rather than long drives and beaches, a programmer's idea of fun is to design and implement a mini-project outside of their work domain.
During one long weekend this year, occasioned due to the harvest festival Makar Sankranthi falling on Friday, the 14th of January, I ventured to program the task of finding the number of syllables in a word.