But is your niece Irish and your wife not? I thought non-hugginess might be an Irish thing, at least sometimes. I have a lot of theories about how Irish teaching nuns influenced the personality of perhaps hundreds of thousands of Brooklynites who may not have been or strongly identified as Irish. I don't know -- I've seen something in my own family that I have wanted to chalk up to that Irish-Brooklyn thing, which is a weird combination of hard belligerence and deep sappiness, as demonstrated by overwrought special-occasion toast speeches and flowery poetry-and-extra-translucent-layer-equipped greeting cards from relatives you'd better watch yourself in front of at ordinary gatherings lest you knock that huge chip off their shoulder.

Okay, enough with that stream of consciousness, I'm under orders to be in bed at midnight so I can't edit even as much as I usually bother to do.
 

Ha, you got me to LOL with the part about having to watch the relatives lest you knock the chip off...funny.

I think you are onto something. My neice is of Irish heritage and my wife (and her family) are of German heritage, and I think Germans are "huggier", at least than Irish. Will probably span the globe with this unless you say otherwise.
 

Sure, span, if you wish.