Well, herself and I went out last night to celebrate a friend's upcoming nuptuals (it was also our anniversary). She and her fiance' are both from the (US) midwest and are mostly of German ancestry. Both wore green. Many of those present were of mostly or entirely Spanish-speaking ancestry...and all wore green, many with pseudo-Irish sayings on their shirts (such as "you don't have to be Irish to be lucky"). Jenn (who is mixed Russian-Jewish and Scots-English) and I (and I'm mostly mixed German, French, English and Irish, with a lot of unknowns) wore green. Drinking was moderate (it was a bar, after all) and none of the beer was green.

St. Patrick's Day in the US has long since become a day to just have fun. I've never lived in a place that had a very large Irish population, so I am probably missing some of the nuances of the celebration there (like excluding gay people from the march in NYC), but most of us really don't think of it as a day to bash the "real" Irish or celebrate Irishness (is that a word?) to the exclusion of everyone else. With all possible respect to friend Azizi, most of us also don't see it as an occasion to pointedly avoid wearing green to emphasize our non-Irishness. And yeah, most of the places I lived while growing up observed the "pinch if you're not wearing green" tradition.

Lighten-up, people.