Folks like to remember the family Christmas with its religious and social events, the feelings of love and affection. The family together as one. The familiar music. Falling snowflakes, sledding down nearby slopes, neighborhood caroling.
But for the active alcoholic, there is usually a dark side.
Sometimes I think our Christmas traditions exist to remind those in recovery and their families of what it was like back in our so-called “fun days of rage” when the active alcoholic took advantage of all the seasonal gaiety.
When I finally made the choice of Unconditional Surrender and sought the help of my Higher Power and the Steps, my recollections of my past days of rage seemed to gradually fade away, and in their place, the Holidays came to be a loving family experience.
Fueled by our ego and its call for a return to the boozy days of old, they don’t just disappear. The memories sometimes return, perhaps weaker with the passage of time, but they never disappear completely.
Somehow various specific inebriated actions in the Christmas Season seem to hover around. For example -- slipping into the beautifully decorated tree; assembling a wagon at two-thirty on the morning of Christmas Eve and finishing up with an extra clamp, a bolt but no nut, and a handle; or your late, maybe noisy, arrival at the church pageant. An inappropriate toast to a friend, or inappropriate sleepwear is given to one’s spouse. But perhaps worst of all was our failure to get to Walgreen’s before it closed on Christmas Eve to buy a bag of batteries for the kids’ new games and electronic gadgets --late because you bumped into one of your old pals, Murph, a buddy from the Antlers Bar, and spent 45 minutes toasting Best Greetings to Murph and Sallie the bartender. Are all these incidents fictitious? Well, let’s put it this way: “What do you remember?”
Come Christmas morning, the active alcoholic exhibits nothing but shame, sour looks and words are hurled. Maybe he himself recognizes he’d messed up again and failed to even get that promised couple weeks in the Program. Excuses flow capped by that old self-pity favorite, “You’d drink too if you had my job.”
But thanks to our Higher Power, the recovered alcoholic now arrives at the family festivities with an overwhelming feeling of gratitude: to his whole family for sticking by him during his troubles, to his home group at the Church, his sponsor, and probably Bill W and Dr. Bob for seeing the light of their Higher Power and learning how to seek and follow His ways.
But listen to this reality: Attend an AA meeting close to Christmas. The speaker with thirteen years of sobriety is well into her regular extravagant Christmas drunk-a-log. Are folks nervously looking around, embarrassed by the stories being told, maybe worrying about their impression on the two newcomers?
No sir! You’ll hear laughter, cries of “I did that!” and “Just like me” and “I couldn’t get that &%lksc# bike together to save my life!”
The joys of recovery, of new starts, of love and hope all come forth. We now live on all the good stuff we get from the Program and have gratitude for those who came before us who responded to our shame and showed us the way they had taken. But alcoholics need reminders of the past to remember our vicious alcoholic conduct.
But dwell on the muck of the past? No! We don’t look at it in shame. We were sick and had lost our Higher Power. Making amends, we moved on. We know this as a bright new life, so we go to our next Twelve Step call to carry the Message we ourselves had embraced.
And with that, on this day, we pass along the Glorious Greetings of the Season to all.
Jim A/Traditions of Lebanon