On my mother's side, all four of my great-grandparents were natives of northern England, who settled in Worcester, Massachusetts and worked in the local mills. There was a large community of expatriate Englishpeople in their neighborhood.Judge Roy Bean wrote: ↑Fri Dec 28, 2018 5:21 am My family history includes a number of folks from north of the US border who endeavored to maintain any number of British societal traditions going back generations despite the fact they were embedded in what amounted to be "the wild west." On my grandmother's side of our clan, boxing day was an honored tradition which those of us on my father's side of the family were looked down on for not following. Apparently, the "servants" aspect of the legend had mutated somewhat; no one was wealthy enough to have servants, thus in our historical rendition of the custom, families who were better off spent some part of the day after the Christmas celebration gathering together their "excess" in boxes and taking it to more needy families they knew or to the church establishment who would arrange for the delivery of it to those who were less well off. Consider that this legend comes from a time not too removed from the settlements of pioneers in the 1800's and it may provide some sense of how such things can be interpreted and affected by family lore.
One day, when my gradmother was little, she asked her mother why their family did not celebrate British holidays, like most of their neighbors did. "Dorothy, your father and I didn't come to America so that we could be British", was the reply.
Of course, the family still sometimes enjoyed traditional British fare at home; and for me, roast beef and Yorkshire pudding is "soul food".