Ghosts of Christmases Past
As an adult child of an alcoholic, you can find both treasures and coal under the family Christmas tree.
I am an adult child of an alcoholic. When I was younger, I had no idea what that really meant. I spent much of my young adulthood marveling at how I was able to escape a traumatic childhood unscathed. It wasn’t until I was well into my 40s that I really started to understand how it all affected me.
I read the landmark book Adult Children of Alcoholics by Janet Geringer Woititz. As a whole, the book changed my life. But one single sentence is seared into my brain: Adult children of alcoholics guess at what normal is. I grew up in such chaos that not only did I have to guess at what normal was but, when confronted with a normal family, I was nearly paralyzed by my discomfort and inability to act normally.
Much of the trauma we endured was centered around the holidays. And while I wouldn’t say that I am haunted by these ghosts, I do feel the cumulative effects of these events in ways that are hard to describe.
The first Christmas that my dad’s alcoholism ruined was around 1980 or 1981. I was about six or seven, and my oldest brother Robbie would have been 18 or 19. He and our dad had been up at the Elks’ Club drinking on Christmas Eve, and when they got home my brother came out to him while they were sitting in the Jeep. They came inside, turning the air thick with tension. After a bit, my father overturned the kitchen table and launched himself at my brother. I was whisked away to a nearby relative’s house, after which the cops were called when the fight moved outside to the front yard. I don’t remember anything else about that Christmas, other than seeing our tree knocked to the floor, the carpet dark with soil from our overturned potted plants.
A couple of Christmases later, alcoholism reared its ugly head again, although more subtly. I woke up on Christmas Day to find the Huffy bicycle that I wanted, but was quick to notice that the white reflector was on the back and the red reflector was on the front. I wondered aloud why Santa got them mixed up and, visibly perturbed, my mother explained, “Well, Santa probably passed out last night and an elf had to work fast to assemble all of the toys and he made a mistake.”
Childhood Christmases were not all traumatic. Some of my favorite holiday memories involve my extended family on my dad’s side, his brothers and their families, all being together. The adults would be drinking, listening to music and playing poker, cutting the occasional rug. I was usually left to my own devices, often lying with my head under the Christmas tree looking up through the lights, tinsel, and fake spray-on snow, mystified at the magic of it all.
When I was 10, though, my dad’s infidelity caught up with him. A teacher at my elementary school was pregnant. He left my mom and married her, and they welcomed my half-sister four days before my eleventh birthday. After that, the holidays were never really the same. Mom tried hard to keep the magic of Christmas alive, but it wasn’t the same. And Christmas with my dad was still often tense due to his alcoholism and the domestic violence to which it contributed. This carried into his relationship with his subsequent wife, but by that time I was in high school and, eventually, college. While inside I still felt like a scared little boy during these outbursts, I was also beginning to grow angry and resentful. “I’m getting too old to be subjected to this shit,” ran through my head often in these situations.
From the time my parents separated when I was 10, until my mom passed away in 2007, juggling two Christmases was always stressful. Given my mom and dad were each married four times, there were always a lot of schedules to work around. And the sheer joy painted on my mom’s face at having her kids home for the holidays made leaving her, whether I was just going across town to my dad’s or if I was heading back home to Ohio from her house in Missouri, feel like anguish.
One tradition that developed as a result of all of this was being at my older sister Karen’s house on Christmas Eve and Christmas Day. Since she had two boys that Santa had to visit, they had to be home. And one Christmas Eve in the early 2000s, I was at mom’s talking to Karen on the phone, wishing I had more time to spend with her (we’re very close). She told me to drive down — about a three-hour drive — and on a whim, I did. It was already dark, and it was about 90 minutes on rural two-lane roads followed by about 90 minutes on the interstate. The first part of the drive had me feeling a little voyeuristic, driving past house after house with families gathered in front of the Christmas tree framed by their picture windows. It felt Rockwellian, and was enough to bring tears to my eyes, remembering that it had been so long since we had a family Christmas like that.
When I got to Karen’s, the boys were already asleep, so I got to be one of their Christmas surprises the next morning. It was magical. Going to her house kind of became an annual thing for me, and when the boys were old enough we started a Christmas Eve tradition that continues to this day: my sister bakes a gingerbread man for everyone and we have a cookie decorating contest. We each decorate our cookie, and post them all on social media and see who gets the most votes.
Since COVID, though, we haven’t been able to make that happen. This year my partner had a family funeral to attend and I am dog sitting; maybe next year.
Another Christmas tradition that started in 2006 is what I call the Gathering of the Gays. In 2004, a group of us — Kevin, Andrew, Chase, Matt, and me — formed a tightly-knit group of friends in Cincinnati. In 2005, I broke up the gang when I moved to Columbus for work. Shortly after, Chase moved to New York, then Tokyo, before moving back to New York briefly before settling in Atlanta. Kevin moved to Charlottesville, VA and then to London. Andrew and his husband Rich moved to Chicago and then Miami. Since 2006, we get together annually the weekend before Christmas in a new city (this year it was Charleston, SC). These guys are like brothers to me, and it doesn’t matter that we usually only see each other once a year. It always feels like coming home.
As an adult with no children, and an atheist to boot, I’ll admit it’s often a struggle to feel the Christmas spirit. I stress about gift giving — my partner is such a thoughtful gifter — and when I am stressed I tend to procrastinate (another trait of adult children of alcoholics), which just makes it worse.
So maybe these Christmas ghosts do haunt me, although more insidiously than the specters that haunted Scrooge. Perhaps I, too, will wake up one Christmas morning, a man changed by his ghosts for the better. Or maybe I will always carry just enough holiday-themed baggage to cast a Grinchy green tint on Christmas.
It’s okay. I can usually find some joy in the season. Some years it’s a peppermint martini. This year it was finding the Brach’s Christmas Tree Nougats, the kind Karen always made sure was in our stockings, at the CVS next door. That, and being surrounded by dogs. That is always my happy place.
