This is going to be my first year ever celebrating winter holidays without my sister, which I hadn't really thought about until now, honestly. It's a weird thing to wrap my head around.
I think that keeping busy and maybe working on creating new traditions with people that you love, even if those people might look different than those from back home, is a good idea. Not so much as a distraction, though that might be a nice side effect, but just to give yourself new things to look forward to and make new memories to add to the old.