I think I’d agree with that, but that’s in reference to a person. A culture by definition must have its own cultural artifacts that aren’t simply taken from another culture. There’s also no requirement for those artifacts to be “high art”. Nearly everything listed in the OP is culture. So to clarify, I ask what you mean when you say “a bunch of the things mentioned aren’t culture”.
Oh for that part of my message what I meant was things like coastlines, cactus, fireflies and foggy days, that’s not culture, what you do with it can be cultural, but otherwise they’re just natural features.
foggy days
I thought that was a British trademark. Foggy Albion and all that.
I think the implication is that the things you do with those natural features form a culture. Fireflies aren’t culture, but catching them is. And besides, there are plenty more examples of culture in the post. But you are correct.
I also think they there’s a lot of things that they associate with US culture in the USA that’s just stuff brought from other countries that were appropriated, so in that sense the US culture isn’t as rich as some people think (but that’s normal for such a young country with such a high number of fairly recent migrants from all over the world). Like trick or treating (to use an example from the OP) that comes from Scotland and Ireland and the first North American record of it was in Canada.
What’s funny is that it’s a pretty good demonstration of the lack of culture that (we can assume) American person has!