Kiss Me, I'm...oh Wait.

Happy St. Patrick's Day!  Remember to wear green or you'll get pinched.  Dye all of your food green and your lakes and rivers too, eat corned beef and cabbage and, if you're so inclined, drink yourself until you're green in the gills.   At least, that's what you do in America.  In Ireland, apparently, they wear orange.

Thus the story of my life:

I never thought I had Irish ancestry but with my first name, I still felt a kinship to Ireland only to realize that our customs of celebrating the Irish are not Irish at all but American.   It turns out, I might have some Irish in me after all.  (Still doing the research)  

I always thought my last name was Scottish.  Sorry family, but, it's not.  I have someone who is really interested in genealogy who shares the same last name but different spelling tell me every single time he sees me, "Ahhh, your name is English.  Mine is Scottish."  (I really need to do the research) 

Previously, I thought I was German, only to find when I traveled to Germany that, in fact, Germans don't think I'm German at all.  (Really, how does a person misunderstand her family history this much?)

And I must not forget the research that I actually have done that traces one family line back to the Posey family who originally went by Poschet, back before they had to escape France due to religious persecution.  (French!  That makes me partly French!)    

A friend in high school laughingly called me a mutt.  (Of course, she was Anglo-Polak or so she liked to tell me. According to Wikipedia, because she is a girl, she would actually be Anglo-Polka but that just makes her sound like a dance) I was okay with it because I figured that I would just hold on to all of the traditions of my ancestors and be the richer for it.  

They call America the melting pot for a reason.  Not simply because we marry and intermarry so that people like me are in constant confusion about which culture to feel akin to but also because we take each culture's traditions and make it distinctly our own.  St. Patrick's Day as Americans celebrate it is quite unrecognizable to the actual Irish.  The Mayday I celebrated as a child almost has no connections to the Mayday poles of England.  I am not even entirely sure that we celebrate Santa Claus Coming to Town on the same days that they do in Europe.  And that's just the start of it...

The conclusion then of all of this madness?  

The fact that I like to take parts of Asian culture and integrate it into my life actually makes me?

Most decidedly,

American.