Is there a Scottish Equivalent to St. Patrick's Day?

It's time for me to acknowledge that I've fallen off the wagon. I haven't picked up a book (any book, really) in about a week. When I'm through with this post, I'm going to give Paulo Freire one last college try, to hopefully alleviate some of the guilt I'm feeling.

My dad told me yesterday that I'm not as Irish as I thought I was -- and he tells me this four days before St. Patrick's Day! He and my mom have been exploring their genealogies online and have been debunking some of the lifelong ideas I had about who I am and where I came from. These ideas were always somewhat general and murky (Scotch Irish, kicked out of Scotland and then kicked out of Ireland and somehow wound up in Ohio), but they were an idea nevertheless, a part of my identity.

So it turns out that the McKee family comes direct from Scotland with no stopover in Ireland at all. The south of Scotland appears to be teeming with McKees (or McKies or MacKays ... or a bunch of other variations), dating back to the early 1700s when my great great great great great great great grandfather, David McKie, left the mother country and set up shop in the British colonies of America. David's son, John McKee, founded McKeesport, Pennsylvania (now kind of a depressed-looking place) in 1795. Dad's having trouble with his maternal line, though he's traced it back to Maryland, and the folks seem to be of English/Welsh descent.

Mom doesn't seem to have found as much in her research, though it looks like the Golemans are also from the British Isles (mostly English, she thinks) and were in Virginia for quite a while upon arriving in the new world.

I'm glad the folks are doing this -- partially because I do find it interesting and am gratified in a way to know where my ancestors came from, but also because it will be one less thing that I have to do when I'm getting old and wishing I knew more about who I am and where I came from. They also seem to be having a lot of fun with it, though, in typical McKee fashion, it took a TV show to spur this interest. They've been watching (and getting inspired by Henry Louis Gates' (he of the Obama Beer Garden Mediation) "Faces of America."