I loved Christmas once. But that was when I was a fall-down, weeping drunk. Put simply, I loved its beauty. But most of all I loved the hiatus from normal life that it presented. A whole month of parties, long lunches and best of all, the feeling of culturally accepted truancy: that end-of-term feeling I have never quite lost from childhood.
Late for work after the office Christmas party? Fine, everyone else is; it’s funny. Leave the office early after a long Christmas lunch with your boss? Of course, your boss stumbled out of the pub first, after all. Sit on the tube with a bottle of wine? No problem, it’s Christmas, it’s allowed. There simply isn’t another time of year when you can say that the nation keeps the alcoholic in her cups company.
This isn’t a new idea, but Christmas and the addict are a match made in heaven. Because if alcohol gives you a liquid bridge into a different emotional plane of yourself then Christmas – the secular, party version at least – is designed to do the same thing. The twinkly idea of Christmas brings you out of yourself and into the world: a world of parties and elegance, a world in which you sit around a table with your family and don’t argue, a world in which you are thin and sophisticated, laughing away with strangers.
I could be talking about the effects of alcohol there, but that’s just the highly intoxicating imaginative high of Christmas. Add alcohol and for an addict that’s like pouring petrol onto a naked flame: dangerous but rather beautiful. The idea that the two were linked to a much deeper, emotional need as the child of an alcoholic was simply lost on me.
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The first Christmas I was sober, there was no flame at all. It was as if the lights had gone out: the fuse box had tripped entirely with all the switches flicked off. Gone were the Noel parties and the long lunches; not because I wasn’t invited to them but because I became scared of going.
With 10 months of sobriety under my belt, by the time Christmas 2010 rolled around, I knew the drill: don’t stay long, don’t explain and never apologise. “You don’t have to explain to people why you don’t drink,” my AA sponsor would say to me as I drafted a public announcement to read out to the assembled crowd. “Nobody will notice,” she told me. I didn’t listen; I wasn’t in the habit of it.
Instead, I went to parties and explained to complete strangers why I didn’t drink. When they looked puzzled, I found someone else to tell. When I had exhausted all the strangers in the room, I turned to my friends who knew the backstory but listened with weary compassion. Frequently, I returned home in tears, lost in grief for a life I had only recently said goodbye to. Frequently, I watched The Snowman on YouTube to make myself cry. For what, I couldn’t tell you exactly.
But I haven’t told you the full story. My first sober Christmas was my mother’s second sober Christmas. This wasn’t a journey I had undertaken alone. Nine months before I crashed into AA at 26, my mother had already been in the “rooms” (as we call them) for nearly a year.
How hard her first sober Christmas must have been for her when I was still drinking, I think now with the luxury of hindsight. Like me, her memories of drunken Christmases past were just as dreadful: days spent in black-out staggering from one festive party to another, mind-bending remorse and shame and, famously, a bottle of vodka stuck in a frozen turkey lifted to her lips in desperation.
Most of all, she tells me, it was the forced joy she had to drum up when I was a child: trying to keep the “magic” of Christmas on the road whilst also suffering from an illness that does its level best to convince you it’s not an illness. One more drink and I’ll be fine, you tell yourself; I’ll stop tomorrow.
Christmas 2010, our first together in recovery, was indescribably hard and healing in equal measure. As we watched family around us sip champagne as the presents were being opened or open red wine over lunch, we stuck close. Once, when a relation had repeated the same story several times in an hour, we caught each other’s eye and nodded knowingly at each other.
At one point, we jammed ourselves in the downstairs bathroom to conduct an emergency mini-AA meeting, laughing as we held hands to whisper the Serenity Prayer. The utterly unadulterated and enhanced joy of laughing with my mother is what I choose to remember about that Christmas lunch 15 years ago. They say you laugh properly in sobriety, and I can tell you that it’s true.
Being sober at Christmas requires practice: changes of habit that become grooved into your brain over many years of abstinence. Some of these changes are subtle and require restraint rather than action: letting an offending remark from a relation pass; allowing someone else to cook in your kitchen even if they’re not doing it how you would like; simply not eating the brandy butter rather than making a show of offence.
Other changes require agency: telling your mother that you love her when it feels hard; emptying the dishwasher what feels like 50 times a day, so others can enjoy the party from the other room; playing with the children at 5am.
Most of all, one must learn the art of not picking up a drink: an act that is restraint and agency all rolled into one. To start with, this feels like an amputation: painful and haunting. Because take away the alcohol and you take away the single most important method of coping that an alcoholic has.
Once the life and soul of the party, newly sober alcoholics can realise – to their great dismay – that they are shy introverts who don’t like parties at all. How do you talk to someone you don’t know after a carol service without a drink? How do you listen to the drink-addled chatter of the Christmas lunch crowd without crawling out of your skin and correcting everyone? Crucially, how do you feel an emotion – pain, sadness, anger – without slipping down the emotional fire escape of alcohol? Is that even possible?
The answer is both simple and complicated: you don’t drink, one day at a time. That may sound obvious, but it didn’t feel that way 15 years ago. These days, I am no longer a newly sober alcoholic at Christmas, looking wistfully at champagne glasses and weeping. Instead, I have two small children, dogs and people to look after. I don’t have time to indulge in melancholy for the past but neither can I forget it entirely; the addict and the sober adult live side by side within me and always will.
So, on a practical level, I do things differently. I say no to invitations that are too hard or too difficult to make. I play with the children more, ignoring tantrums and arguments over batteries. I try not to snap. I ask for help and, when it comes, I experience it as a shot of relief or a little flower of hope. If that means eating a mince pie in bed, then so be it.
These days, after over a decade of sobriety, I approach a family Christmas differently. Which is to say, I approach it with great excitement as opposed to the addict’s shame or remorse. Some traditions I skip altogether: lighting the Christmas pudding with brandy or toasting with champagne at every possible opportunity. Of course, I try not to buy chocolates or mince pies that have alcohol in them, but it’s also no huge drama if they do; I won’t have one, but I want others to have a good time. Amazingly, I want to have a good time, too. Life, relearned.
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