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an opportunity to travel back to the motherland
That made me think of the typical habit of 'young adults' to go back to the parental home for Christmas. It's the one time in the year when everyone's likely to be home, so for several years between people leaving home and people settling down and making their own families, Christmas is also when you organise a big pub get-together with your mates from school/college/neighbourhood. I hadn't really thought of it as a tradition, but it kind of is. Also, feeling old and nostalgic now I'm long past the age of doing it.
hoefla
@Belagerent
Growing up we would mostly use Christmas/boxing Day/new years Day as an opportunity to travel back to the motherland. It's the perfect time, there are cheap flights, England is approaching it's bleakest whilst the southern hemisphere is in summer, you have to take the days off anyway etc. So in normal times I would recommend that as the best thing to do for brown people.
More recently as we don't have the cash to fly home every year anymore we tend to get together as a family and just hang out for however many days of holiday it makes sense to take. Same as we might on any bank holiday. The time of year does end up dictating our actions to some extent. My mother does actually like sprouts so we often end up eating them (not necessarily on Christmas Day) and in past times we sometimes went to the boxing Day sales, which is the closest we ever got to a tradition. I've enjoyed Xmas parties at some of the companies I've worked at too.
In hindsight I'm quite glad my parents never treated Christmas as anything other than an alien practice that we tolerated. I don't think there's anything to be said for taking on someone else's traditions for your own (outside of relationships, etc). Especially not as a POC in this xenophobic hellscape. Men are going to call me a paki from out the window of their cars for a long time to come. Putting up some tinsel won't make me feel any more integrated.
My advice would be to just treat it as any other bank holiday. Maybe you'll end up forming some routines around it, maybe you won't, if you do they'll be yours to own and might form the basis of a gestalt identity for your kid rather than just a capitulation to a colonising culture.