In terms of my own cultural heritage,the big thing is probably food :). Because I grew up within an Italian American family, that cultural legacy feels absolutely a part of who I am. People speaking Italian, cooking Italian food, singing me little songs when I was a baby...it's all a very real part of my heritage. Our family, like many immigrant families, defines itself through its history and its stories - whenever I go home, there are always family stories that come out at parties and gatherings: how my great-geandparents met packing lemons in a warehouse in Messina; how my great-grandfather kidnapped my great-grandmother because her family didn't approve of him, and dashed across the hills on horseback with her brothers in hot pursuit; all the particulars of the farm they bought when they got to America; the pajama factory the girls went to work in when they turned 12; the fact that my grandmother's school teacher complimented her on how white her mother's sheets always were when they were hanging on the line, "not like those other dirty Italians"; my grandlother's eldest sister writing down all the sizes of the clothes they needed from town, so that when they arrived my great grandmother would not have to speak and give away that they were Italian; the time my grandmother's sister and brothers drank their father's homemade wine and couldn't turn the tap off, so they let it run into all these dirty bottles, and when their father got home and found out he whipped the boys and tied them to a tree; the time my two uncles dug a "bear trap" with barbed wire in the bottom and lured their sister into it (she still has the scars on her hand)...you get the picture. These stories all happened before I was even born, but they are SO real to me. And they are some of the threads that continue to bind all of these dozens of disparate people that make up my family, even four generations on. They help to tell us who we are.

My dad's family was Irish. While I've always been interested in that culture, it doesn't have the same immediacy for me because I didn't really grow up inside it. I visit it like any other cultural tourist would.