Today is Australia Day, commemorating the landing of the First Fleet in 1788. As holidays go, it's a bit problematic: imagine if the US had a holiday that celebrated people from another land colonising a continent full of less technologically advanced natives, eventually killed in huge numbers with the survivors and their descendants being shunted onto reservations. Oh, yes, that's right – that's Thanksgiving.
Really, though, Australia Day is more like America's Independence Day, the Fourth of July, in that it takes place in the middle of summer and is an excuse for people to take off work, have a BBQ, and maybe even go watch a parade and wave a flag. But I've never really cared for July 4th, myself. I've never been fond of over-earnest and overt displays of country-love, perhaps because I've never really felt that away about any country. To me, they're places where you're from or where you live or where you visit, but I've never felt like they were an integral part of my identity. If I identify as anything, it's as a New Yorker, but I still don't celebrate the founding of New York or wear I♥NY shirts or have the state flag tattooed on my arm. I have a feeling that many other expats would feel similarly; it's hard to get too excited about one country over another when you're stuck with a foot in each one. (Immigrants, on the other hand, are a different bunch, and often the most patriotic of all about their adopted home.) I've also always found such breathless displays of patriotism a bit tasteless, being by nature exclusionary and tribalistic. Maybe I'm just a silly humanist, but I'd like to think that we could all rise above that sort of thing; I'm more interested in how people all over the world are the same, rather than how they're different. Maybe once the aliens land, we can all start thinking of ourselves as simply human – which will just give us a new bunch of creatures to exclude.
Thankfully, Australians are generally much more laconic about their patriotism (being generally more laconic and relaxed than most in many ways), and even though the news programs will show lots of kids in the park with the flag colours painted on their face, usually the most Australian way to celebrate Australia Day is to not celebrate it at all. Which is funny, since by hanging out at home today just as I would in the US, I end up being more genuinely Australian without even trying.