Christmas is all about family. I mean, it’s technically supposed to be about the birth of Jesus, but the bits of the holiday that haven’t been co-opted by consumerist capitalism are, essentially, about family.
Everywhere you look you see happy families: your mates, adverts, sitcoms and films. Other people might say they find their parents difficult but you can tell that they’re actually really looking forward to going home.
If you’re the child of an alcoholic the odds are you’re dreading the whole bloody thing. You’ll nod and smile when other people regale tales of how lolz their parents are, how much everyone in their family likes to get sozzled or when they moan about how ‘annoying’ their mums are because they still try to make them tidy their rooms even though they’re now entering the twilight years of their twenties. Deep down you’re thinking ‘you have absolutely no idea what it’s like to actually hate Christmas’.
Having an alcoholic parent at Christmas is not the same as having a parent who likes a drink at Christmas. In fact, Christmas is pretty much the worst time of year for children of alcoholics (although, I’ll be honest with you, there’s never a great time of year) because the whole holiday revolves around booze.
Alcohol, or rather my dad’s addiction to it, has been ruining my Christmases for as long as I can remember. Even the most hardened alcoholic behaviour appears normal at Christmas, booze for breakfast, lunch, dinner and scotch all the way to bed, particularly in middle class suburbia.
As a child throughout the year I would put up with having two different dads: sober dad and drunk dad, in the hope that on this one day, the 25th of December, things would be different. The anticipation of Christmas, the idyllic time when all the wrongs in the world come right, was like a beacon of hope. Christmas day was always the warm, enticing light flickering at the end of a very long tunnel.
On that one day, I would think, everything will be OK. We’ll wake up and he won’t be angry, he won’t sneak off into the garden to hammer bottles of wine because he can’t cope with the reality of their own existence, he won’t snap for no reason, he won’t say anything unkind and we’ll have the perfect Christmas because, well, it’s Christmas and that’s what is supposed to happen. They stopped fighting on the battlefields of the First World War on Christmas Day you know. Every year I willed it to be OK, naively. Somehow I would erase the disappointment and destruction of every Christmas to date from memory because if I believed that it could be different, then it would be.
Of course, Christmas could no more cure my alcoholic dad and what his problem did to our family than it could actually stop a world war. In reality it was just another day of the year when we had to tip toe around on egg shells and do everything in our power not to address the elephant in the room: dad’s drinking and Jekyll and Hyde demeanour.
Over time I grew to hate Christmas, I would dread it because it would only serve to shine a light on how unhappy we all were. If we went to visit grandparents on Christmas day dad would stay at home, alone. People never came to us. There was one year that we didn’t go anywhere, he basically spent the entire day either in bed or smoking in the garage where, we later learned, he had a secret stash to rival even the most well stocked off licence. He didn’t speak to anyone.
And then, in my late teens I grew to resent Christmas. The whole holiday is about hope, optimism and good cheer. As a kid you fully buy into the ‘magic’ of Christmas, you want to believe in Christmas miracles – people doing things for one another against the odds, overcoming adversity and making peace with one another. I was out in the cold, looking in on everyone else’s Christmases: the people on TV, my boyfriends, my friends and even other members of my extended family.
And then, one year, things changed. Not necessarily for the better. Dad’s drinking nearly killed him. He was hospitalised for several months over the summer and really nearly kicked the bucket.
That Christmas that followed was his first sober Christmas in my adult life. It wasn’t much better than a drunken one. In fact, in some ways it was worse.
The weird thing about being the child of an alcoholic and wishing that they would stop drinking is that when they do, a gaping hole is left. You realise how many awkward situations booze had been smoothing over, how much emotion it had been numbing and, perhaps more than anything, what a distraction it had been from your parents’ deep seated sadness.
We used to dance around, on tip toes, trying not to mention the glaringly obvious fact that dad’s drinking was a problem. Now we do a different dance, we wonder if we should take booze to his on Christmas day. Does drinking in his presence undermine us asking him never to drink again? We worry when he goes to check on the roast potatoes that he’s got a secret stash in the kitchen that he’s swigging from when we aren’t looking. We wonder what happens when we go home, leaving him alone and worry that in weakness or loneliness he’ll find comfort the only way he knows how.
As far as I can tell there doesn’t seem to be much of a happy ending or Christmas miracle for children of alcoholics when they grow up and become adults themselves. After all, real life isn't like Love Actually. Even if your parent gets sober (ish), which is of course a great thing, it can create a whole new set of problems. Things that should be fun are stressful. Things which should be indulgent Christmas treats, like drinking, are guilty minefields. Things which other people look forward to fill you with apprehension and anxiety.
I guess the silver lining is this: as I enter what is, somewhat terrifyingly, proper adulthood I’m determined to do Christmas differently, to make every Christmas from now on count and make up for the 27 years when it was totally crap. Nobody will be on edge and there will be no dread, but there will be guilt-free champagne (let’s be realistic, Prosecco) at breakfast.
You might also be interested in:
The Reality Of Being A Suburban Drug Dealer On Christmas Eve
If you'd like to talk to someone visit the National Association for Children of Alcoholics website