You're right, we don't have any songs to Mary, but it never struck me as unusual. Later I thought "Mary had a little lamb" was surely about her and Jesus though.
Well if it helps, the orthodox among us look with suspicion on some other Protestant groups just as much as we do with Catholics.
Your perceptions regarding the cultural aspect of our veneration of icons (we have no statues in the Orthodox Church -- strictly forbidden), etc. are quite accurate.
But I would suggest that you might also hold those perceptions in place and move around to look at them from a little different angle. :-)
A way I might put it that more closely reflects what we experience is that we do not make as strict a division between the cultural/social and the religious. In other words, all of this is very much "religious," but then so is everything we do outside of church.
Most Christians would agree that Christianity needs to be a way of life, and not just a religious activity. We would certainly hold that view in spades.
An Orthodox theologian was once asked when, exactly, the Orthodox believe that the bread and wine become the Body and Blood of Christ during the Eucharist. He thought for a moment, and replied that it happens sometime between the start of Vespers the evening before and the end of the post-liturgy meal (we're big on breaking bread together after Liturgy -- partly to break our eucharistic fasts together, partly because it just seems wrong to break off fellowship just when things are getting going!)
He was partly joking, but his point was a serious one, both with regard to the fact that we aren't big on defining things to the nth degree, and with regard to the importance of the entire cycle of preparation and post-communion fellowship, some of which is comprised of formal church services, and much of which is time spent in personal prayer, family time, and church family time surrounding the serving of the Divine Liturgy.
The eating of a meal together as a family is just as "religious" as are the prayers before and after the meal. Our daily work is just as sacramental as are the morning and evening prayers we use to begin and end that working day.
So, there is a very real sense in which we are "socializing" with the saints who are portrayed in the "family pictures" (icons) in our church home -- and that those saints are a part of our living culture.
Perhaps the best way to see this is to see the comfort and ease with which our children enter into all of this. They are very much aware, in their child-like way, that they are at home, surrounded by family...