My family went to my grandparents’ house for Christmas dinner. After they both died, we went to my Aunt Sally and Uncle Bob’s. They lived in the same town as my grandparents and had lots of room. The grownups would eat buffet style in the living room and the kids (I had lots of cousins and 3 sisters) would eat in the basement at the ping pong table.

Before dinner there would be lots of loud visiting time and what I came to know—lots of drinking—EXCEPT for my Aunt Sally. She would sit quietly in the living room and visit with folks. Often someone would ask: Does Sally have her Tab? (Tab was the precursor to Diet Coke). I remember wondering why so many of my adult relatives wanted to know this. I don’t really know why I always noticed all the attention my relatives had about Aunt Sally’s drink.

As a young adult I learned that Aunt Sally was an alcoholic. Her disease started when she was young, and her system had a terrible time with it.  She had blackouts and seizures. Apparently, she was too drunk to go to her own mother’s funeral. In the 40’s there was little that could be done but to have her go to a hospital and dry out, which she did repeatedly. I learned all this indirectly through comments made here and there. No one really talked about it.

By the time I was 10, she was sober. No one in the family talked about it. She never talked about it, but later I found out she had been in AA. I think the family (many of whom I believe were also alcoholics) believed that only Aunt Sally was an alcoholic and that their drinking was normal. My family was a whisky and wine in crystal glasses type of alcoholics. The only thing they did to acknowledge Sally’s drinking and then sobriety was to make sure she had her Tab. I believe she was the only adult at those Christmas dinners who wasn’t drinking heavily.

Fast forward to when I was 36 years old, drinking daily, and Christmas is coming, and I am falling apart. I was angry, irritable, and very discontent.  My anxiety was out of hand and all I could do was to figure out a way to drink and not have it show. Our elegant Christmas dinner that year was tense, though I think some of the friends who came (by then I lived 300 miles from my family) didn’t think anything was amiss. I was the one though who kept going to the kitchen to get another bottle of wine.

By the end of January, I knew I had to do something. One of my oldest friends was two years sober and one of my sisters was sober as well. I went to see my sister and she took me to many AA meetings—it was my version of a treatment center. I returned to Seattle, my home, and my life got better and better.

When Christmas came around again, I wanted to have a big dinner. It was my first sober Christmas. I looked at the crystal wine glasses in the china cabinet and felt sad. What would I do with these goblets now that I didn’t drink? I took my sadness to a meeting and talked about it and shared that I didn’t know what to do—a few people laughed and I didn’t understand why. One woman came up to me after the meeting and said with a smile that she understood but wondered: “Have you ever thought that you could drink some other liquids in those glasses other than wine”? Then I laughed—“no, I never thought of that!”. I was sober! 

I could have a wonderful Christmas and be honest about my sobriety and I could fill beautiful glasses with juice or something else. I toasted my Aunt Sally, who had long since died, that Christmas with a Diet Coke in a beautiful crystal wine glass and thanked her. Now I understood on some level why I so remembered her drinking her Tab. She was planting a memory that I would need 26 years in my future.  —Libbie S.