Sober Through the Holidays in New York: Thanksgiving to New Year's

Last reviewed: October 2026

The five weeks from the night before Thanksgiving to New Year's Day pack most of the year's drinking occasions into one stretch. There is the family dinner, the office party, the neighbor's open house, the relative who has never once accepted the word no, and a New Year's Eve built around a glass at midnight. It gets dark before five and money is tight. The meeting you rely on may not happen at all, because the church needs the room.

A drink is still a choice, but this is the time of year when planning ahead does more for you than willpower in the moment. This page is written for anyone not drinking this season, whether that means a few years in A.A., a few weeks, or simply a decision to sit this one out.

Why this stretch is harder than the rest of the year

Part of it is the calendar. One study of several hundred drinkers found that New Year's Eve and Christmas ranked among their heaviest drinking days of the year, ahead of ordinary weekends. The night before Thanksgiving has acquired its own name in bars and in road-safety campaigns alike, Blackout Wednesday, because so many people go home for the long weekend and spend the first night of it out with old friends.

The other part is that the things that usually keep people steady come apart at the same time. Routines break, the home group closes for the holiday, and your sponsor may be out of state. You are back in the house where you grew up, surrounded by people who knew you when you drank and may have opinions about whether you are allowed to stop.

The calendar is fixed. Most of the rest can be planned around.

Plan your meetings before the calendar fills

Meeting lists are least reliable during the holiday weeks. Churches need their own rooms for services, especially on Christmas Eve, buildings close early, and a group that has met every Thursday for twenty years may not meet on Thanksgiving. Listings rarely catch up in time, so check the day before, and if it matters, call the intergroup line for your area.

If you are traveling, look up meetings near where you will be staying before you leave, not on the first difficult evening. The Meeting Guide app works across the country, the schedule links on this site cover every part of New York State, and online meetings run around the clock wherever you have a signal. The guide to online meetings explains how to join one from a spare bedroom without making a scene of it.

Alcathons, and where to find one

An alcathon, sometimes spelled alkathon and in Queens called a share-a-thon, is a marathon meeting: one room, with groups taking turns to host an hour each, running for a day, two days or a whole week over a holiday. A.A.'s General Service Office was already writing about them in its newsletter in 1975, describing groups working together to keep a room open for anything from twelve to sixty hours or more. The point is to have somewhere to go at any hour on the days when everything else is closed and every television is showing people raising a glass.

The clearest example in New York State is Queens, where the intergroup posts its share-a-thons well in advance. Its Thanksgiving share-a-thon for 2026 is already announced, from 6 p.m. on Wednesday, November 25, through the afternoon of Saturday, November 28, at Grace Lutheran Church, 103-15 Union Turnpike in Forest Hills. For the last two years it has also run one from Christmas Eve afternoon to New Year's Day at the Christ the King Center on Farmers Boulevard in Springfield Gardens. Watch the events page at queensaa.org in early December for this year's details.

Elsewhere in the state, holiday marathons are organized group by group and announced on intergroup and area event calendars, usually two or three weeks ahead. Look in mid-November for Thanksgiving and in early December for Christmas and New Year's, and if the calendar is silent, ask on the phone line. The Online Intergroup of A.A., at aa-intergroup.org, lists online marathons over every major holiday, which is the realistic option in the parts of upstate where the nearest room is a long drive on icy roads.

You do not need to stay for hours. Plenty of people drop in for one meeting at a time they would otherwise have spent alone, and some sign up to make coffee for a shift, which gives them a reason to be there that has nothing to do with how they are feeling that day.

Thanksgiving and the family table

Most people dread the family dinner more than anything else on the calendar, and it is also where a little preparation goes furthest.

• Bring your own drink. Arrive with something you like to drink, sparkling water, a non-alcoholic beer or a bottle of something festive, and keep a glass of it in your hand. People rarely offer a drink to someone who already has one.
• Have your own way home. Driving yourself, or knowing exactly when the last train leaves, means you can go the moment you need to. This matters more than any line you rehearse.
• Give yourself a job. Carving, dishes, the kids' table, walking the dog. A job gives you a reason to leave the room and something to do with your hands.
• Decide how long you are staying. Three hours is a visit. An evening with no end time tends to stretch on until somebody opens the good bottle.
• Call someone before and after. A five-minute call on the way in and another on the way out turns the dinner into something with a beginning and an end.

As for what to say, you do not owe anyone an explanation. Saying you are not drinking tonight is a complete answer and needs no follow-up. If a relative keeps pressing, that tells you something about the relative rather than about you, and it is a good moment to go and check on the pie.

If Wednesday night used to be your big night out, replace it with something specific rather than just staying in and thinking about it: a meeting, the first hours of an alcathon, or a film with someone who knows why you picked that night.

The office party

Work parties are easier than family in one respect: nobody there has a stake in whether you drink. Get a soft drink or a non-alcoholic beer from the bar early and hold onto it, talk to the people you came to talk to, and leave once the speeches are over. Plenty of people slip out at that point anyway.

If the event is at a bar and you are in your first months without drinking, it is reasonable not to go, or to go for half an hour and leave. Leaving a work event early is normal, and nobody will remember on Monday who stayed latest. The guide to alcohol-free drinks has more on ordering something decent when there is no menu for it.

New Year's Eve

New Year's Eve is built around one moment, and the simplest plan is to decide in advance where you will be at midnight. That could be an alcathon or a late meeting, a friend's apartment where you know the crowd, or home with people you like and a film timed to finish at 12:05. Going to bed at ten is also a perfectly good way to see in a new year, and you will feel better than most of the city on the first of January.

If you want something in the glass at midnight, non-alcoholic sparkling wine is the one category in dealcoholized wine that is reliably good, and the larger supermarkets usually carry a bottle or two. The guide to non-alcoholic wine covers which ones are worth the money.

Be careful on the roads that night, even if you are entirely sober yourself. State and local police run dedicated impaired-driving crackdowns over Thanksgiving and from mid-December through New Year's, and with reason. Across New York in 2024, 300 of the 1,101 people killed on the roads died in crashes involving an alcohol-impaired driver.

If you are alone for the holidays

Being on your own at Christmas is its own risk, and for some people a bigger one than the crowded dinner. A.A.'s book Living Sober gives loneliness a chapter of its own, and the old slogan HALT, for hungry, angry, lonely and tired, has stuck around because those four states are when a drink starts to look like a reasonable idea.

Alcathons and holiday meetings exist largely for this. Some groups also hold potluck dinners or open houses on the holidays themselves, and these appear on intergroup calendars alongside the regular meetings. If there is nothing near you, an online meeting on Christmas afternoon is full of people in the same position. And the person you call from your list on Christmas night may well have been hoping somebody would.

If January is when you stop

Plenty of people decide on New Year's Day that this is the year. Dry January, which started in Britain in 2013 and is run by the charity Alcohol Change UK, has made a month off a mainstream idea, and the research on it is mostly encouraging. People who take part generally drink less afterwards rather than making up for lost time.

Pay attention to how the month goes, though. If a few weeks without a drink turn out to be much harder than you expected, take that seriously and act on it. The guide to what happens at a first A.A. meeting covers walking into a room for the first time, and the comparison of A.A. with SMART Recovery and other programs covers what else is available in New York.

Common questions

Do A.A. meetings run on Thanksgiving and Christmas?

Many do, and some groups add extra meetings, but plenty of regular meetings are cancelled because the building is closed. Check the listing the day before, or call the intergroup line for your area.

What is an alcathon?

A marathon meeting over a holiday, with groups taking turns to host an hour each so that a room stays open for a day or more. You can come and go as you like.

Is there a phone line that answers on Christmas night?

New York State's HOPEline, 1-877-846-7369, answers 24 hours a day every day of the year. Several A.A. intergroups also run 24-hour lines, among them Queens on 718-520-5021 and Rochester on 585-232-6720.