What parts of our traditions and culture makes you feel like you belong in Britain

Ha ha, no. In France and the supermarkets are full of Christmas chocolates - they appeared as soon as the Halloween sweets disappeared 🙄

It is not bad wording, it is a fundamental failure to understand our geography, our political union, social history and culture.
No wonder you are confused about what it means to be English.

One aspect of modern British (maybe English - please correct) culture I don’t like is the early commercial start to Christmas. I know European countries used to leave things until Christmas Eve, which is much more special, but is this now changing?

it’s got a lot worse since my long-ago childhood when my family didn’t get into Christmas mode until then. We also marked Halloween, but not in the OTT American way it’s done now. At least with commercial Halloween it keeps the Christmas stuff away until November, which is a small mercy I suppose!😀

I'm part of the rural farming community & very proud of my English heritage & culture.

Immaculately turned out horses & livestock at our local show is probably the showcase. Tweed jackets & ties that are shared & passed down the generations of children.

My own children scrubbing up their scruffy farm ponies to compete in turn out classes that I did as a child.

Local produce show & school & church harvest festivals where families share the food they have spent all season working to produce. The whole community celebrating & thanking the people who work on the farms to feed everyone else.

Yup. I don't know about Japan, but I often read Indian news, and Modi is all over the place doing culture stuff.

What I do know a bit about is China, and culture is a massive part of the state media machine. I would say much more than in UK media.

It is used by the Party as a propaganda tool. 5000 years of history and all that. It has actually been interesting to see the way culture is promoted has changed, It's only 50 years or so since the cultural revolution, when culture was targeted for destruction, the 4 olds.

But that has been reversed , stricken from the history books, and now Chinese culture is right up there, probably in the top 3 subjects being pushed.

The pub, a full English breakfast, a nice roast dinner, a curry, prawn cocktail crisps, Swizzels Matthews sweets, Marmite.

(Can you tell I'm a very food orientated person!)

Outside of food, knowing who Mr Blobby is, Only Fools and Horses, Neighbours (Yes, I know it's Australian, but no-one watches it over there, most of its viewership was always British), BlackAdder.

Fireworks Night, Conkers, having a cider in a pub garden on a boiling hot afternoon, sticks of rock, boxing day swims, a chippie tea.

While I'm technically English, I've spent most of my life living in Wales or Scotland, so don't really identify as any of them. But all of the above make me feel very British.

Cheer up old thing!

I've lived abroad for a long time but have never really identified with a British culture as such. Born and raised in Scotland and have always felt Scottish however. And fully identify with the earlier poster that mentioned that feeling of being Scottish in the Thatcher era. Much of the anti-English sentiment that I have been exposed to can probably be traced back to that time.

More generally, I have lived in a few countries and work in a highly multicultural environment with people from dozens of different countries. There are 2 things I think that are fully and intrinsically British and differentiate Brits from other nations:

• the immediate urge to put the kettle on upon returning indoors from any trip, however short
• the overriding obsession with class - and the middle class guilt, snobbery and inverse snobbery that derive from it. You don't notice how ubiquitous this class mentality is in the UK until you live in a country where class just isn't a thing. It's the one thing about the UK that I absolutely do not miss at all.

Fun fact.

Some super evangelical churches won't permit evergreens/Christmas trees in the bidding due to Celtic roots and indication of Pan.

Same reason some Christians won't knock on wood (invoking Pan plus superstition).

Thank you CC , I spent a bit of the morning chatting to a new friend who was a midwife in the middle east. She cannot believe the calm, peacefulness of a (leafy, always leafy on MNet) suburban, English weekend.
I listened in horror to her tales of childbirth in the dark with a couple of sheets and a bucket of water... usually in the morgue because it was the most missile proof.

We often cannot contemplate what makes our life so good until someone comes along with a horrifying, but matter of fact story of a truly different world.

Sea side holidays with sand in your sarnies
Church fetes
Football and cricket
Pomp and ceremony- Im not particularly particularly a royalist but the Queens funeral was spectacular
Morris dancers
May Day
Queuing
Chippies
Tea
Tea and toast
cooked breakfast
Cream/ afternoon tea
The pub
Moaning about the weather
The arts
The landscape
The King's speech
Carols at King's
Trip to see Father Christmas
Nativity plays
Carol services
Harvest festivals

With the chip-nicking gulls!

Fish and Chips at the seaside.

I don’t draw any lines. You seem to want it to be a tickbox exercise so you can do a ‘gotcha’.

Well, that is the subject of our thread, is it not?

By the way, I notice that you never answered my question: where do you draw the line?

Oh, I've thought of another one.
Union and chapel banners.

It’s and it’s not surprising you had to stop typing once you had only queried British heritage not any others?

Which 1000 years, was that the Bronze Age?

The sixth cousin law is interesting- was that an Anglo Saxon one?? Although I'm guessing it didn't apply to royalty ...😬

Well I had to stop typing at some point, didn't I 😆.

This is the sort of day which we should remind ourselves we are incredibly lucky to be able to experience. Lovely ordinary, inexpensive, cosy, peaceful things which we take for granted or even disparage (not me!). Millions of people in the world have vastly different lives and with all its problems and imperfections to be born in Britain is still a huge blessing.

Well, what do you mean by ‘Irish’? Technically nobody is ‘Irish’ - Irish people today are descendants of Europeans who made their way to what we now know as ‘Ireland’ before it was even ‘Ireland’. And what do you mean by Ashkenazi Jews? Most ‘Ashkenazi Jews’ are not 100% Ashkenazi Jewish, but have a mixed heritage with DNA from various areas.

Oh wait, I forgot this ‘logic’ only applies to British people - I’ll shut up now.

All those people married into the existing population and contributed to our history and ancestry. The British Isles had remarkably little change in population for well over 1,000 years. All those people blended together. On average, if you take an English or Scottish person then they test as 6th cousins because, from 597AD until after the reformation, no one could marry anyone more closely related than a sixth cousin (sharing a great great great great great grandparent).

Battle of Cable Street! The East End coming together to protect its Jewish community from the fascists.

It is, yes.

Is that Kipling? My grandmother used to read Kipling to us.