Episode 37: The 12 (NA) Beers of Christmas

Christmas never fails to make me feel good. But drinking my way through the season leaves me feeling like hot garbage. So this year, I stopped cold turkey long before Turkey Day.

Holiday drinking is an international sport, a holly-jolly right for all: hard partiers, casual drinkers, yo-yo dieters and, let’s face it, just about anyone else looking for an excuse. The Christmas lights go up and everyone gets lit, ho ho ho and a bottle of rum. I’ve suited up and worked my elbow every season since my freshman year of college, but for the first time in 26 years, I took myself out of the game until Christmas Eve following the last underwhelming sip of red wine on Halloween night. 

This was a calculated decision, one I had been considering for months – for years, really – as I found my relationship with alcohol changing. Thank the aging process for that. My father had warned me in college that it gets harder to drink (and harder to recover) the older you get, and of course he was right, but I didn’t believe him until it started happening to me in my thirties. (It only got worse in my forties.) The body, in many ways, is smarter than the brain, and most of the time it won’t put up with your stupid shit, especially when you drink. At 45, I can no longer rely on an afternoon rally after an evening of heavy drinking; it takes two nights of sleep and a lot of self-care to feel normal again, and normally I’m left feeling like I don’t want to drink again for a very long time. But “a very long time” is relative, as soon enough I’ll find an empty glass of resolve in one hand and a fresh beer in the other.

I’m fortunate to have enjoyed alcohol consumption without being consumed by it, but that doesn’t make me immune to habitual behavior, especially around the holidays. Each season I joke about how and when I’ll have my Christmas cry, but there’s no denying the holidays serve as a dry-heave of pent-up emotions that collect in the gutter of the heart over the preceding year. In this context, alcohol is friend and foe – especially when you work retail. I got my first taste of the life as a teenager working for Payless ShoeSource at The Plaza at Chapel Hill (not knowing it was training for my second career in music retail), and I’ve now worked 14 holiday seasons with The Record Exchange. While each season is different, the pace is reliably and brutally the same: a marathon you run at wind sprint speed. How you get from Point A to Point B may change from year to year, but no matter the course, you likely get through it with a little (or a lot) of booze. 

There’s nothing wrong with blowing off steam after a long day at work, but in early January 2019, as I came down off another holiday retail season and took stock of my mental and physical health, I finally noticed a pattern I had established with my seemingly innocuous drinking. It snuck up on me in the sly way habits often do – not through bright, brash, neon-lit excess, but through dull, meek, subtle repetition. When the holidays arrived each year, I was drinking, in some capacity, nearly every night through November and December: Happy Hour pints with coworkers; dinnertime bottles of wine at home with my wife; solitary late-night spirits to help burn through to-dos. It all added up, and on the back end of the season, as the health-and-wealth promise of a new year unfolded, I felt comprehensively terrible. 

My first crack at a practical solution, for the 2019 holiday season, was to cut back on booze – the terms were vague, as in, undetermined – and combat my consumption with a dedicated, no-excuses wellness routine. So while I continued to drink, I forced myself to do something, anything related to movement every day from November 1 through Christmas Eve, then log the activity on my phone. Running, walking, biking, hiking, yoga… it all counted as long as I took the time to halt life once a day and move for movement’s sake. At the very least, I figured it would keep me from gaining 10 pounds while I inevitably imbibed, and I managed to stick with it through sore throats, 12-hour work days and other seasonal obstacles – I even got out my mat for a drunken yoga session at home after our staff holiday party. Yet, I still packed on the pounds and I still felt wretched after we packed up the Christmas tree. Cue the pandemic and our cross-country move, and after drinking just about every day from June through our mid-September move-in date, I didn’t bother to set guardrails for the holidays. Lo and behold, I fell into the same rut. I had grown so accustomed to reaching for something, anything, that while working on a newsletter one typical December evening, I went to the fridge, grabbed a beer and poured it into a frosted glass before I realized what I was doing. I did not even want the beer, but no sooner than I had assumed my position behind the keyboard after dinner, a Pavlovian reflex kicked in. The first sip was tasteless – unless defeat counts as a flavor. I finished the beer anyway.

Nearly a year later, with the 2021 holiday season approaching, that tasteless beer remained etched on my brain. After hitting a low point with my wellness in early 2021, I had spent the spring and summer burning off my COVID reserves through a significant dietary shift and rigorous exercise regimen, and I was damned if I was going to let the holidays ruin my hard work. So I decided, in an effort to construct a framework for discipline, to limit myself to 12 beers from November 1 through December 23 and, similar to my 2019 holiday health decree, log the activity on my phone to keep me honest. Mind you, it was still open season on other booze, but long ago I had identified beer as Public Enemy No. 1 when it came to my waistline, especially in winter. Human beings have not gone through a significant evolutionary change in the last 10,000 years, and when we tilt away from the sun and the temperature drops, our brains do battle with our bodies’ ancestral biology. In my case, the Neolithic struggle to maintain winter stores is now me versus a six-pack of IPAs, and I put on five pounds in just as many days once I reunited with beer on Christmas Eve 2021. Mind you, I make bad food choices when I drink, and dunking my paw into a perpetual tub of Costco peanut butter pretzels did not help.

It’s worth noting that during this experiment in pseudo-self-control, I nearly reached my 12-beer quota before the calendar had flipped to December. I was doing okay until I got to Boise for a holiday work trip. On Black Friday alone, I burned through five pints between after-work beers with John O and a Black Sabbath tribute show with my friend and go-to enabler Bill, taking my total for the season to seven with 28 days left until Christmas Eve. By the time I returned to Ohio, I was down to two beers left, and I drank one of them over dinner with Erica and Magnolia on the way home from the airport. The 12th and final beer, a BrewDog Elvis Juice, disappeared on December 11 at the Pink Floyd tribute concert with my dad. At least I made them count – all 12 were consumed in the company of others in the name of holiday cheer – but the key takeaways were, I could not count on myself to spread a dozen beers over an eight-week period, and limiting one form of alcohol while continuing to consume all others does not do a body good. It was evident that something drastic was in order for Christmas 2022.

Months before the holiday season, I was already getting tired of drinking. I can’t pinpoint a day or a moment when I arrived at this realization; it was less an epiphany than an awareness of my growing boredom with an activity I had enjoyed for most of my adult life. The more thought I poured into it, and the more I saw my drinking as a mindless default for weekend nights and social occasions, the less I wanted to interact with it. So, I stopped interacting with it as much. By October, I was logging my consumption – or lack thereof – along with runs, walks and other movement, mainly to see how much (or how little) I would drink if I actually thought about it first. And of the 31 days in October, I had at least one drink (but often more) on 14 of them. On paper, that stat did not look great to me; nor that I drank every single day during an eight-day work trip.

More and more studies are finding that any amount of alcohol is worse than none – even the glass-of-wine-a-day proponents are pulling back – and Americans (especially young Americans) are drinking less than they were a few years ago. Regardless of age, the “dry month” is all the rage among the “sober curious.” Its origins date back a decade – leading advocate Alcohol Change UK trademarked the term Dry January in 2014 – but the movement only recently went mainstream, with 35% of U.S. drinkers participating in Dry January 2022, up from 21% in 2019. It’s a popular topic for post-holiday wellness articles, with the Onion, a reliable cultural barometer, chiming in this year with its “Things to Never Say to Someone Doing Dry January” (sample: “How are you embarrassing yourself this month, then?”). Parallel to this trend is the rise of non-alcoholic beers, seltzers and “mocktails,” and enterprising brewers are positioning these products not as last-ditch options for problem drinkers but as no-less-refreshing-and-fun alternatives for “mindful” lifestyles. (Naturally, my January Facebook feed has been inundated with sponsored ads for NA beers and other alcohol-free spirits.) While January is the go-to month, I’ve also known people who took a break in November or October – Sober October, get it? – but I’ve never heard of anyone going dry for the holidays. It was worth a try – or rather, worth doing, because if I set out to do it I was going to do it, cue Yoda for the inspirational pull-quote.

November 1 fell on a Monday, so I woke up standing on solid ground – rarely in my life has Monday been a drinking day, and it was helpful to have the first few days (the hardest part of breaking a habit for me) be normal weekdays. Post-Halloween, I’m usually detoxing from the seasonal sugar binge, but knowing I’d be giving up booze, too, I downshifted on the fun-size sweets to make it easier on my body and brain once I went dry. The strategy worked; I leaned hard into my water consumption and gorged on Costco dried mango to compensate, but all in all, the first week was a breeze. It helped that, in addition to my regular exercise routine, I had set a parallel goal of walking every day. The forced fresh air was nice. My head was clear, my focus sharp, my energy high. I was feeling good from top to bottom.

But there were challenges ahead. Namely, social interaction and work travel. Alcohol is a big part of both, and one-by-one, in situations where I normally would be drinking, I had to explain to others what I was doing – more accurately, what I wasn’t doing. Certain people got it right away, but very quickly, I got the sense certain others thought something fishy was going on. My parents, oddly enough, seemed the most perplexed. When I first mentioned that I wasn’t drinking until Christmas Eve, my mother audibly gasped and exclaimed, “How are you going to do that?!” I replied, dryly, “I’m just not going to put alcohol in my mouth.” Three weeks later, while FaceTiming my parents from Boise with my brother and sister-in-law on Thanksgiving, my Dad pierced through the cacophony of the group chat with an unsolicited, to-the-point follow-up question: “Why aren’t you drinking?” 

Once I got all the explaining out of the way, socializing in public – where my comfort level increases exponentially with a drink in my hand – was easier than expected, even in bars. It helps that more and more places are providing options other than O’Doul’s. At home, I had been dabbling with NA beer for about a year, influenced in part by John O, who had stopped drinking in December 2020 after going on meds that required strict abstinence from alcohol. I know few people who like beer more than John O – it’s been a big part of our bond over the years – and when he mentioned he wasn’t missing it as much as he thought he would, and he was finding NA beers to be sufficiently flavorful and satisfying, it made me take pause. Forced sobriety was a huge lifestyle change for John, but with alcohol-free craft beer taking off, the timing was fortuitous. He regularly sends me photos of new beers on the market, and by the time I jumped on the NA train, I was able to source many of them in conventional grocery stores. While in Boise for my holiday work trip, John handed me a sampler sack of recent discoveries to try, and I didn’t have to look far to find others, as every bar and grocery store I visited had abundant options. True to John’s claim, they were all suitable stand-ins, and while hanging with friends in familiar haunts like Neurolux, or nestled with family by the holiday hearth, having something, anything in my hand was enough for me to relax and settle in.

Yet, there were moments I thought I would break. I can pinpoint one of them: the early evening of November 16. It was a slow sales week – even slower than normal for mid-November – and I was working on first-quarter budgets and fighting the credit department of our worst vendor, all while trying to squeeze in some writing before I got on a plane to Boise in four days. The world outside the window next to my chair was a monochrome bummer: bare branches, a shroud of gray, some indecisive sleet/snow bullshit whipping around in the wind. I could feel the stress from head to toe, and normally I’d reach for 12 ounces of relief. But I walked it off, opened the fridge and took a swig of oat milk to stave off the urge to wash the day away with a beer. Another evening – different circumstances, similar stress level – I had a particularly satisfying banana at 10pm. The night after getting back from Boise, still tired from the travel and staring down a task I had to finish before bed, a hot shower at 11pm woke my ass up in a manner usually reserved for a chilled whiskey. When nothing short of a beer in my hand would do the trick, I went ahead and put a beer in my hand, only alcohol-free. As I got deeper into my sober season, these near-desperate moments were fewer and farther between, and by the end of my booze ban, I had not even finished the 12-beer BrewDog AF Mix Pack that I bought to tide me over until I reunited with the real thing.

On the afternoon of Christmas Eve, Erica, Magnolia and I drove to my parents’ house with some early gifts, including six-packs of BrewDog Hoppy Christmas and Brew Kettle Winter Warmer. Erica was a key supporter throughout the season, staying dry with me through all of it minus one trip to New England to reconnect with old classmates after the death of a high school friend. My intent all along was to mark the end with an afternoon beer on Christmas Eve, whether by myself or with any willing participant(s), and I was happy to have some of my favorite people join me for the low-key ceremony. I’m not gonna lie – that first taste of Hoppy Christmas IPA was terrific, and it stayed that way until the last satisfying drop. Ditto the bottle of red wine Erica and I shared over dinner that night and the drinks that followed over the course of the holiday weekend. But after three nights of festive consumption, coupled with 72 hours of shoveling cookies and cakes into my mouth, I was already sick of drinking. And tired. And irritable. And lethargic. I can’t deny the evidence: I felt infinitely better without alcohol.

In early December I had taken a walk one late afternoon, right in the midst of the golden hour on a rare sunny winter day in Northeast Ohio. I could see and sense the days getting shorter, the darkness of the solstice imminent, but as I looked up at the muted amber light blanketing the bare branches, a surge of gratitude overtook me. I was grateful for my decision, grateful for my health, grateful for my newfound vitality. The holiday retail season is still a slog, still a heap of stress, but getting through it without alcohol proved to be easier than getting through with it. We’re not breaking up for good, but my relationship with booze has indeed changed forever, and now we’re on better terms than ever. Cheers to that.

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