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Christmas hasn’t always meant warmth, family, or celebration for me. For nearly a decade, the holidays were some of the most frightening days of my life. While others wrapped gifts and prepared meals, I was consumed with one mission: securing enough pills to avoid opioid withdrawal.

People rarely talk about this side of addiction — the logistics, the panic, the constant calculations. For me, the days leading up to Christmas weren’t merry or bright. They were a dangerous countdown.

My entire holiday hinged on whether a doctor would answer the phone before the office closed. I’d sit in my car with trembling hands, rehearsing my tone before calling, trying to sound calm even as fear tightened my stomach.

I knew exactly which doctors might authorize an early refill and which ones suspected I had become addicted. My 10-year addiction, which began when I was prescribed painkillers after knee surgery, had me cycling through more than 65 doctors in a half dozen states — each one recorded in the many calendars I hid in drawers. They were my secret maps for survival.

I would flip through them frantically, searching for any appointment I could make to save me from a night of withdrawal. I wasn’t looking for relief or euphoria. I was looking for a way to avoid the sickness that came the moment I ran out.

Many of the pharmacies I used were inside large chain stores. While they stayed open late, their pharmacies did not. As the metal grates rolled down over the pharmacy windows, the rest of the store hummed on. That contrast haunted me — bright aisles full of shoppers on one side, and on the other, the closed counter that meant I would be sick by morning. Once those grates came down, my options disappeared.

My withdrawals weren’t mild. At the height of my addiction, I was taking close to 30 pills a day just to feel normal.

When the supply ran low, withdrawal hit me brutally and immediately. My stomach would bubble, my skin would prickle, and waves of nausea and trembling would take over. My chest tightened until breathing felt like work. Fear of that sickness controlled my entire life — especially during the holidays.

There were Christmas Eves when I sat alone in my car, looking at my dwindling supply of pills, trying to make it last through the night. I would delay doses longer than my body was used to, forcing myself to wait, bargaining with myself, fighting back tears each time the sickness crept in. It wasn’t safe. It wasn’t smart. But that was all I could do.

At family gatherings, I appeared frail and hollow. While everyone raved about my mother’s sweet potato pie, I barely touched my plate. My stomach was in knots, and nausea had stolen my appetite.

I’d slip into the bathroom, sit on the edge of the tub, and try to steady my breathing before returning to the table. People often assume addiction is about chasing a high. Mine wasn’t. Mine was about avoiding the physical collapse that came when the drugs left my system. I wasn’t celebrating Christmas — I was surviving it.

Addiction has a way of making you disappear, even when you’re standing right in front of the people who love you.

Today, my holidays are very different. More than 15 years into recovery, I can sit at a Christmas table fully present. I can breathe without fear. I can enjoy a meal. I can laugh. I can be myself again.

But I never forget the version of me who couldn’t.

And I haven’t forgotten the people who are living that experience right now.

If you’re struggling this holiday season — if you are using, withdrawing, unhoused, hiding your pain, or simply trying to make it to tomorrow — I want you to know something:

Your story is not over.

You are not beyond help.

You are not alone.

Even if all you can do today is stay alive, that is enough. The holidays are hard for many people, but especially for those battling addiction. I survived nights I didn’t think I would survive. And if I could make it out, so can you.

This Christmas, my prayer is that you hold on — just long enough for the light to break through.

There is life beyond this moment. Even if you can’t feel hope right now, hope can still find you.

Chekesha Lakenya Ellis is a certified peer recovery specialist. The Burlington County resident uses Facebook to raise awareness about addiction and recovery.

With the announcement of record sales across the country on Black Friday, including $11.8 billion in online transactions, the holiday shopping season was off to a great start. In the next few weeks, the average person was expected to spend about 10% of their annual shopping budget. By Dec. 25, the National Retail Federation expected a record-setting $1 trillion to be spent nationwide on consumer goods.

As a Christian, I am not supposed to like the commercialization of Christmas. I was taught from childhood that the birth of Jesus is “the reason for the season,” not gifts. In recent years, critics of all faiths — and none — have joined a growing chorus of anti-consumerist sentiment toward the holidays.

But rather than dismissing holiday shopping as a symbol of materialism and excess, I have come to view it as an expression of generosity and joy that captures the purpose of the season.

The tradition of giving gifts at Christmastime was introduced several centuries ago in Europe by Christians who took stories about the gift-giving of an ancient saint, Nicholas of Myra, and turned him into the modern Santa Claus. As the Industrial Revolution created a new middle class and increased the availability of consumer goods, the tradition grew.

The importance of material generosity at Christmas was especially championed by Charles Dickens in his 1843 novella A Christmas Carol, which depicts the infamous Ebenezer Scrooge’s transformation from a penny-pinching grump to a joyful philanthropist.

Dickens’ largely secular vision of giving gifts at Christmas helped to make a holiday originally confined to Christians more accessible for an increasingly pluralistic world.

Of course, there are problems with the connection between Christmas and shopping. I do not like how it can exacerbate class difference, revealing a vast disparity in the quantity and quality of gifts from one household to the next. The upper and middle classes can use Christmas as another opportunity for an exotic vacation or the acquisition of yet another status symbol.

One only needs, however, to recall the refrain from so many holiday movies to realize that the vast expenditure inherent to the season is not the main problem.

As Charlie Brown struggles in A Charlie Brown Christmas to pull together the perfect Christmas play, he realizes that, while he may need a Christmas tree for the set, it does not need to be particularly tall, pretty, or even upright. A short, scrawny tree will do just fine.

Christmas is about being content with what you already have and, out of that contentment, being generous to others. Instead of trying to buy happiness, or a better relationship with a loved one, or the perfect Christmas tree, we can use Christmas to focus on what someone really needs.

To keep ourselves focused on others and avoid unnecessarily lavish gifts, my wife and I use holiday sales as a means to get a discount on items that we would otherwise buy for our kids at some other point in the year. We also focus on practical gifts people will actually use — last year, we got a battery caddy for my mom and gardening gloves for my dad. Our son requested an expensive toy this year — an electric train set — so we found a small one that is in good secondhand condition, which reduces waste and expenditure.

Perhaps the greatest reason why I like to give gifts at Christmas is that they embody the heart of the Christmas story — the one, ironically, that so many Christians use to create skepticism about Christmas gifts — in which God “gave” Jesus as a savior for the world (John 3:16).

Perhaps, then, giving gifts does not destroy Christmas; it captures its very essence.

B. G. White is a faculty member in the theology department at Boston College.