Spotlight On Sobriety 12/28/2025
- GaL-AA Newsletter Committee
- Dec 22, 2025
- 8 min read
Updated: Dec 28, 2025
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After The Holidays
Discover LGBTQ+ Recovery Voices
Grapevine - How I Made It Through the Holidays
Spotlight On Sobriety 12/28/2025
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After the Holidays
When the holidays are over, the silence settles in. The guests have gone home, the decorations are boxed up, and the last piece of pie is long gone. What’s left is the quiet hum of January — the empty spaces where laughter filled the room a week ago.
For me, that silence used to feel like relief. Then, sometimes, it felt dangerous.
I can get through the holidays themselves just fine these days. I’ve learned the tricks — show up early, leave early, keep my own car, stay close to my AA friends, and focus on connection instead of consumption. I can host dinners, attend gatherings, even navigate those awkward office parties without a drink in my hand or a pit in my stomach.
But then New Year’s passes, and something changes. It’s like the air shifts from celebration to solitude. No one’s dropping by anymore. The phone stops buzzing. The calendar clears out, and if I’m not careful, that quiet can start to echo.
There’s a phrase I’ve heard around the rooms — “the letdown after the let-up.” That’s what the days after the holidays can feel like. The buildup of December gives us purpose — gifts to wrap, meals to make, events to plan — and then January asks us to sit still. That’s when the old thinking can sneak back in. “Maybe I can handle just one.” “Maybe it wasn’t that bad.”
And then there’s the real-world stuff: leftover bottles from parties, the half-finished wine someone forgot, the unopened gifts that suddenly look like temptation. The problem isn’t just the alcohol — it’s the time, the quiet, and the space between us and accountability.
That’s when I pull out one of my favorite pieces from Box 4-5-9, Winter 2016 — “Twelve Tips on Keeping Your Holiday Season Sober and Joyous.” It was written for the holidays, but it works just as well after them. The wisdom doesn’t expire with the tinsel.
Here’s how those tips help me through the silence:
1. Line up extra AA activities. The holidays may be over, but the need for connection isn’t. I schedule coffee with newcomers, volunteer to answer the phone, or help clean up at the club. The action keeps me out of my head and reminds me I’m part of something bigger.
2. Be host to AA friends. Sometimes I’ll invite a sober friend over to watch a movie or just hang out. It doesn’t have to be fancy — pizza and honesty go a long way.
3. Keep your AA phone list close. When that old restlessness hits, I don’t try to outthink it anymore. I call someone. Not text — call. There’s something about hearing a voice that brings me back to center.
4. Find out about special meetings. Many groups have “post-holiday” or gratitude meetings in early January. I go. Even if I don’t feel like it. Especially if I don’t feel like it.
5. Skip events that make me uneasy. I remind myself: I used to be great at excuses when I was drinking — now I use that same skill to protect my sobriety. "No" is a full sentence.
6. Bring something sweet. If I do attend something where alcohol’s around, I keep mints or candy handy. Small comforts can be powerful.
7. Leave early. There’s no rule that says I have to shut down the night. I make plans that include an “important date” with my pillow.
8. Worship in my own way. For me, that means prayer, meditation, or simply quiet gratitude. The holidays remind me what I have — January reminds me to keep it.
9. Don’t sit around brooding. I fill the time with things that nourish me: reading, walking, calling old friends, writing. My disease likes whispering to idle hands.
10. Don’t get worked up about temptations. One day at a time still works just as well in January as it did in December.
11. Enjoy the true beauty of love and joy. Even after the gifts are gone, love remains. I can give it freely now — without needing anything in return.
12. Practice the Twelfth Step. This might be the most powerful one. When I reach out to help another alcoholic, my own silence breaks. Service turns the volume down on loneliness.
When I think back on my drinking days, the holidays were chaos — bright lights masking dark feelings. Sobriety didn’t just give me the ability to survive the holidays; it gave me the awareness to appreciate what comes after them. The quiet is no longer punishment; it’s an invitation. A pause before the next chapter.
Still, I don’t romanticize the silence. I respect it. Because I know how my mind works when the noise fades. I stay connected. I lean on my program. I call people even when I think they’re “too busy.” I show up to meetings when I least feel like it.
And every January, I remind myself — sobriety isn’t something I celebrate once a year. It’s something I recommit to every morning.
The holidays come and go, but recovery stays. The laughter may fade, the decorations may come down, but gratitude — that’s the gift that lasts.
Steve N. Las Vegas, NV.
Download - Original Twelve Tips 2016 Box 4-5-9
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How I Made It Through the Holidays
Magazine Issue: December 2024
Author Name: Lisa C.
Author City: Bozeman
Author State: Montana
With less than two weeks sober and liquor everywhere in sight, how on earth was she going to not drink?
Several years ago on a bitterly cold Friday night, I went to my first AA meeting. I was new in town and wasn’t properly dressed for that night’s subzero temperatures. I spent the first half of the meeting shivering from a wretched combination of cold, fear and alcohol withdrawal. I spent the second half crying. As “Bill’s story” in our Big Book says, “how dark it is before the dawn!”
For the next few days, I went to AA meetings, collected phone numbers and then went home and drank alone. The phone numbers belonged to cheerful strangers who welcomed me warmly and seemed to want to help me. “Of course you can get sober,” they told me. “Don’t wait until after the holidays. Don’t even think about the holidays. Just to try not to drink, just for one day,” they said.
Although I didn’t quite trust these cheerful strangers, on the seventh day after my first meeting, I decided to try to stop. Much to my surprise, I managed to stay sober for 24 hours. That was December 13, 2013. The next day, I did it again. And then the next. For the first time in a very long time, I started to feel some hope. It was a tiny, flickering candle, lashed by winds of despair that howled through my sick mind. You won’t make it through the holidays, my disease told me. You’ll never stay sober long-term, so you might as well give up now, it insisted.
But for the first time in ages, I wasn’t entirely at the mercy of these sick thoughts. Those cheerful strangers kept telling me I didn’t have to pick up the first drink. I tried with all my might to listen to them instead of listening to the lies my disease kept telling me.
Then came Christmas Eve. I endured the family dinner, where seemingly everyone but me gleefully chugged wine. But afterward I quickly headed over to the Fellowship hall for another dinner—this one with sober alcoholics. I plopped down at a table full of strangers and stared at the pumpkin pie on my paper plate.
I tried to get a few bites down, but it was hard to swallow past the lump in my throat. In that moment, I remember thinking that if I started to cry I was going to throw myself to the floor, curl up in a fetal position and howl. I’d cried in public more during the preceding three weeks than in the whole rest of my life put together, and I was becoming less shy about it. But crying would have been awkward at a Christmas party, so I bit my lip and fought the tears.
Then a nice man sitting next to me leaned over and introduced himself. “I haven’t seen you before,” he said. “Are you new?” I nodded miserably. “I have 11 days,” I told him. “But I don’t think I’m going to make it through today and tomorrow.”
And then the tears came. I didn’t throw myself to the floor or howl, but I cried. I really, really didn’t want to drink. I just didn’t think I had a choice. The man just looked at me and smiled. “You’re going to make it,” he said matter-of-factly. “I can tell.” Then he went back to eating his dinner.
He seemed so sure! I don’t know why I believed him, but I did. I stopped crying. I forced myself to talk to a few more people. I stuck around for a few of the late-night marathon AA meetings and then went home and fell asleep sober for the first Christmas Eve in a very, very long time.
Three days later, I heard a woman tell her story at a meeting and it was my story. After the meeting I asked her to be my sponsor. On New Year’s Day, she celebrated four sober years, which seemed to me like an eternity. She helped me stay sober through the New Year and for many years thereafter.
These days I make it a point to go to the dinners and parties and marathon meetings that happen in my town during the holidays. In contrast to that first year when I felt so alone, now these gatherings are full of friends as dear to me as family. But I always try to keep an eye out for someone I haven’t seen before, someone who might need a kind, reassuring word from a stranger in order to make it through the next 24 hours.
I have so much gratitude for the person who did that for me. He made all the difference as I struggled through that first Christmas Eve. I don’t know if I would have made it without him. I just know that I’m glad I didn’t have to.
Copyright © The AA Grapevine, Inc. (December 2024) Reprinted with permission. All rights reserved. To subscribe to AA Grapevine, please visit https://www.aagrapevine.org
Spotlight On Sobriety 12/28/2025
The Spotlight On Sobriety 12/28/2025 features personal stories, articles and reflections submitted by members and friends of the fellowship. The views expressed are those of the individual authors and do not necessarily represent those of Alcoholics Anonymous or GaL-AA.
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