Celebrating Christmas?

Salam Alaykoum
I guess Christmas is a quite difficult time for converts: should we visit our families, or just ignore the celebrations? How can we avoid haram meat, alcohol, mixing, but without hurting our families? Among the sisters I know, some decide to pay their parents a visit, as a sign of respect, but do not take part in celebrations or religious activities, and some just stay home and try to explain their families that Muslims don't celebrate Christmas and treat this day as any other day. Some will ask: but Jesus(peace be upon him) was a Muslim prophet too after all, so why not celebrate his birth? Well, I wonder how many people honestly believe he was born on Christmas Day: actually, Christmas is originally a pagan festival: Emperor Contantine, upon converting to Christianity, merged polytheist festival and the story of the miraculous birth of Jesus (pbuh), and started the tradition of celebration the Christ's birthday, a celebration that was actually rejected by early Christian scholars and has no basis in the Bible. But anyway, us Muslims don't celebrate prophets' birthdays (and that goes for Muhammad pbuh, too): we follow them. We were taught that we have only two A'yad: 'Aid ul Fitr, at the end of Ramadan, and 'Aid ul Adha, in remembrance of the story of Abraham (pbuh) and his sacrifice.
I actually attended my mother's Christmas dinner last year, because I was a new Muslim and was scared to give a bad impression to my family if I refuse to come, or to hurt them. I did feel quite unconfortable: I barely ate because the Turkey wasn't halal, was branded "rude" because I barely saluted non mahram men ( in my country, we kiss each other to say hello, even people you don't know, which complicates everything)...Not a great evening for me! Although hamdoulilah, my family doesn't actually give any religious significance to Christmas (they are not even Christians), so I didn't feel like I was involved in Shirk. This year, I opted to stay in London, but I'm going over to visit in a couple of days to compensate my absence. And hamdoulillah, I do feel a bit stronger in my Islam for not going, even though it hurts a bit! Anyway, just to say to my convert sisters, it's a tricky time for all of us, it's difficult to take the right decisions without hurting anybody in the process, and it's hard to change our habits and try to become better when your family is against you... May Allah make it easy for us all!