Throughout all of my years of drinking, I can only remember one person even mentioning the fact that perhaps I drank a little too much. Kevin was a man I dated for several years in my mid-twenties. He was married, but promised to leave his wife (yeah, right). I was able to spend time with him by getting him as drunk as possible so that he would miss his last train home. My goal was to get me drunk, get him drunk, and enjoy the time we had together, hoping to persuade him to get divorced.
After one particularly drunken evening, after which he had to take a 100-mile taxi drive home in the middle of the night at great expense, he thought it might be a good idea for us to take a break from drinking. He even bribed me. If I could stop drinking for a week, he would take me on vacation. Even the potential of that extraordinary pay-off only got me through three days of sobriety.
Looking back on my level of alcohol dependence during those days, I would have to say that it was pretty high. Every time I drank, I drank until I was drunk. I needed to drink more and more to get drunk - which was getting to be pretty expensive. I spent an inordinate amount of time drinking, and an equal amount of time recovering from the binges. Attempts at limiting my intake or quitting entirely were futile. All of these are surefire signs of a purebred alcoholic.
Kevin and I eventually broke up, in a drunken fight. During one last night of excessive drinking, I was convinced that I he was about to tell me he would leave his wife. He told me the opposite - that it was time for us to part ways. We were drunk, we were standing on a train station platform, and with one punch, I leveled him. My last vision of him is bleeding, flat out on the ground. I never saw him again.
Alcohol abuse or addiction or alcoholism - whatever you call it, led me to that point. I know Kevin moved on with his life, but I had done irreparable damage to his marriage and his family, I had wasted several years of my life in futile pursuit of something that wasn’t really that valuable (a cheating man), and I had spent a small fortune on getting the two of us drunk. I wish I had seen the signs of alcoholism then, heard the plea of Kevin for me to stop drinking, and seen what drinking had brought me to - for it would have saved me a lot of pain later on.

My mother’s holiday culinary masterpiece was her Bourbon Balls. Mix sugar cookie dough with a half bottle of bourbon (alcohol content: 40%), roll the little balls in powdered sugar and what a treat you have. Feed them in large quantity to small children and watch the fun.

My grandmother’s favorite after-dinner treat when we visited her home as children was a sundae made with vanilla ice cream covered in crème-de-menthe (alcohol content: 25%).

Even as a child, it was impossible to get through the holidays alcohol-free. As an adult it is much harder. After 14 years of sobriety, I am still offered alcoholic drinks at my parents’ homes. People readily trade bottles of wine at work, and chocolates, cookies, and cakes are alcoholic landmines.

For the first few years of sobriety, I simply told people I was allergic to alcohol. This straightforward warning made people go out of their way to protect me from the danger. As I became more and more comfortable with being a non-drinker, I told people I chose not to drink. Period. This did not work.

By telling people you don’t drink and not giving them a viable reason, you open yourself up to challenges and trickery. I have had my non-alcoholic beer intentionally switched with an alcoholic one on more than one occasion. I have had people dare me to drink, calling me, of all things, a coward.

Because I do not publicly or privately accept the label of “alcoholic”, I have never used it as an excuse for not drinking in public. People may or may not assume it, but I have never used it, not even to my husband. He knows I don’t drink, he knows the reasons why, but the word “alcoholic” is never mentioned in our household.

Navigate the holidays with ease by being honest. If you can admit to being an alcoholic, say so and it will make the season a lot easier. If you can’t or won’t admit it, be careful. Active alcoholics can spot an abstainer a mile away and will often go out of their way to curtail your efforts to remain sober. Alcoholics love company, so be careful what drink you pick up!