The chips in the basket
Sobriety chips, medallions and the newcomer coin: what the colored tokens on the literature table mean, who hands them out, and why.
Near the meeting list, most Seacoast rooms kept a basket or a small box: colored aluminum chips, a few brass medallions, and the white newcomer chip on top. The system is informal enough that the General Service Office does not supply the tokens, and old enough that every member knows the colors by heart.
What the colors mark
The sequence varies a little by region, but the Seacoast rooms ran the common American set: white for surrender, the chip picked up at a first meeting or a first day back; red at thirty days; gold at sixty; green at ninety; then longer intervals in red, blue, bronze and the annual medallions, brass coins stamped with the year number. A birthday meeting ends with the celebrant's group handing over the coin, usually to applause and one bad joke about the weight of it.
What a chip is not
A chip is not a credential, and AA's own literature is careful about that. It proves nothing, certifies nothing, and is issued by nobody's authority: a member asks the chairperson for the color, or a sponsor keeps a white one ready. The power of the token is entirely in the hand-off, the room watching one person walk to the basket and come back with a disc that cost pennies. The old district never listed chips as a service, yet the basket sat on the same table as everything the district did supply, which says something honest about the table's division of labor: the official pieces carry the program, the informal ones carry the people.
The white chip's job
The white chip deserves its own paragraph because it is the only one aimed at a stranger. Groups keep them loose in the basket so a newcomer can take one without ceremony or explanation, a pocket-sized placeholder for a decision nobody else can verify. The ritual around it is deliberately minimal: no signature, no date required, no questions. If the district's whole apparatus can be said to exist for one moment, this is the candidate for the moment: the room offers, the newcomer decides, and the token rides home in a coat pocket as the physical evidence that the door opened.
The birthday meetings
Once a month, many groups run a birthday meeting or an anniversary night, and the old site kept a "group anniversaries" page for the same reason it kept a meeting list: these are the nights the table gets used hardest. The basket comes forward, the year's coins are counted out, and a group finds out how much sober time is sitting in its own chairs. The numbers are never tallied officially anywhere; a district's memory is kept in metal, one disc at a time.
Where the tokens come from
The medallions themselves come from outside AA entirely: commercial vendors sell them to groups and intergroups, which is why the chips carry no official sanction and why the designs differ. Some baskets run plain aluminum, some run enamel; a few groups add the group's name or the town. The annual coins are usually brass with the year stamped large, the one token every regular can read across a room. Because no office issues them, a group's chip supply is someone's errand: the treasurer orders a sleeve of newcomer whites, a sponsor keeps the mid-year colors in a glove compartment. It is service of the smallest kind, invisible on the roster, and the table would look wrong without it.
