Uptight before Christmas, all through these rooms alcoholics were stricken with holiday gloom. They prayed, “Santa, please make us happy, joyous & free, bring us candy and presents and serenity.”… Greed filled their minds and envy their hearts and someone said, “It’s time for the meeting to start!” “Does anyone have a topic for discussion tonight?” Every face in the place turned wintery white! They lost all self-seeking, self-pity and self-will when down through the chimney came the ghost of St. Bill! He chuckled and said as he sat himself down “Call the White House and tell’em there’s a new Dubya in town.” Then he looked through a big book and said with a tear, “Wow! No one rewrote this after all these years! Clean house, help your neighbor, be loving and kind, and don’t take the first drink one day at a time. How could a message as simple as this be realized, analyzed and intellectually dismissed? here lies the reason this ghost has arrived: to re-give a gift that has saved all your lives!” Then he set up a big screen and a DVD so every lost soul in the meeting could see. He played a movie of drunks at their best and their worst, what is and what was, when blessed and cursed. There were scenes of a housewife passed out at a bar, a respectable businessman wrecking his car, a fight in a kitchen, a fight in bed, a fight at a reception between newlyweds. An empty bottle, a desperate man alone in a motel with a gun in his hands. He puts down the gun and picks up the phone and whimpers and blubbers, “Honey, let me come home.” She hangs up as she tells him, “Don’t call here anymore.” He reaches for the phone book and falls to the floor. Somehow that phone book seems to capture his gaze: it’s open to a number under the “A”‘s. Then all of the people in the movie converged on the poor side of town in the basement of a church. Driven together in a willing herd to hear of hope and deliver the word. The ghost of Bill W. turned off the TV and said, “The first word of the first step is ‘we’. I suggest you start there and see where you go. Be thorough and fearless, and please-take it slow! Let faith set the tone, let love make the mood and as for a topic…how about ‘gratitude? Just don’t drink, go to meetings and pray and be glad you’re alive and sober today. Be a good woman, be a good man and be of service whenever you can. Be a good mother, be a good dad and try to be good to your kids even when they’re bad. Be a good husband, be a good wife… Merry Christmas to all, and to all a good life!”