It's not easy being an anti-nationalist cultural-syncretist rationalist atheist quasi-trans-humanist singulatarean when your kid's school is looking for volunteers for the international cultural day.
We're one of the many international families sending a NZ-born child to Ilam School. I'm Canadian, Susan is American, the kids are Kiwis who are eligible for the other citizenships. While there exist things that are certainly Canadian and American, they're not really part of our culture, even if they're part of the culture of the places where we were born. And the things that we do do are really close enough to the things done by other Kiwi households that it would be pretty boring. Presents at Christmas, pancakes with maple syrup, sledding when there's snow... hohum. There's more curling in Canada, but Kiwis do it too. Same for hockey, which here you must preface with the word ice to distinguish it from the silly field variant with the tiny tiny sticks. Bad weak coffee is Canadian culture, but not my culture. And a cultural demonstration of arresting people for selling wheat or milk outside the marketing board doesn't really show the best of Canada, isn't my culture, and is a bit too didactic for my taste anyway.
It's not like our family doesn't have a culture. The kids get more Canadian stories and songs at home than would most Kiwi kids, but I expect that they also get a lot more of the Wotanic and Greek myths too. The kids have heard and enjoyed Anne of Green Gables, but it's no more a part of our culture than is the Wizard of Oz, Alice in Wonderland, TinTin, Lord of the Rings, Dungeons & Dragons, Little House on the Prairie, Wagner's Ring Cycle, The Iliad & Odyssey, Tennyson, Coleridge, Poe, Kipling, Freakazoid, Pinky & The Brain, or any of the international fairytales from the kids' audiobooks to which we listen on the morning commute. Inuit artwork is overrepresented at our house relative to a Kiwi norm, but so too are the amate paintings of San Agustin Oapan.
And so I haven't a clue what to fill in for the international day questionnaires. Our at-home culture is chaotic good / rationalist-geek-science / pluralist libertarian. When they're a bit older, they'll get the Yudkowski treatment, but it's kinda built into a lot of stuff already.
Our kids play Paper-Rock-Scissors-Lizard-Spock. Maybe we could share that as being broadly representative. It's closer to right than making poutine and having him wear his Winnipeg Jets sweater.
