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The enthusiasm natives may have for their national traditions is not a given in all cases, but when it does manifest itself it does not surprise. The enthusiasm emigrants and expatriots have for the same is well known; the pull of home and its ways is strong. The obsession with the traditions of the home country exhibited by the descendents of the emigrants of former times is famous and well-studied. The pull of the imagined remembered home never even seen possesses a strange power -- perhaps one should simply say possesses and leave it at that. The enthusiasm demonstrated by certain by rights wholly unconcerned parties for the traditions of a distant land with which they have chosen for their own mysterious reasons to associate themselves is not at all well understood, but neither is it a wholly unexampled thing. One does meet such people. But the vigor with which some (by rights even more wholly unconcerned) friends of such people participate in or even instigate the celebration of such traditions once having gotten wind of them is entirely inexplicable.

That being said, however, it should be pointed out that some traditions end up making more sense in a new and unconnected place, having been translated into (of all prosaic tongues) English, as when a Monday morning starts with a brisk and festive walloping of someone's backside and the cheery cry of buns! buns!