In Praise of Tea

Growing up in an Irish household, I was convinced early on that tea was the very stuff of which life was made, and that all human existance was dependant upon it. Food, shelter, oxygen, tea; those were the four cornerstones of human survival.
Imagine my horror when I was a kid and went to an Italian friend's house once and they didn't have any tea in it. After a supremely satisfying dinner of pasta, garlic bread and amaretti cookies, they had wine instead of tea (not a bad idea, in hindsight). After dinner was tea time, in my experience, it was just what you did.

I was taught how to make a decent cup of tea when I was old enough to be trusted with boiling water and the task itself, since third-degree burns were just as serious in my house as making a cup of weak tea. Woe betide the fool who put the tea in a cold pot, or didn't let the water come to a proper boil. I remember my father, say about someone that they didn't even know how to make "a 'day-cent' cup of tea", which was about as far down on the fool-0-meter as one could get.

Tea was the great equalizer, the restorative, the cure-all. Had a bad day? Have a cup of tea. Need to resolve world hunger? Do it over a cup of tea. Been abducted by aliens? It won't seem so bad once you've had your tea. It's just as well my mother never took it into her head to go to medical school, because all she would ever have prescribed is a good strong cup of tea to set you to rights.

For most of my adult years, I drank coffee and Diet Coke in near lethal amounts, but recently I've noticed that the caffeine in both has started to make me jangly and twitchy, and I've come back to tea. And guess what? My mother was right; a cup of tea makes everything better. Tea is now my crack.

Thing 1 has inherited my love of tea, and we have been experimenting enthusiastically this winter; we've been buying a new kind every trip to the grocery store. Celestial Seasonings makes some mighty fine herbal teas, with Sleepy Time at the top of our list. (The "Sugar Plum Spice" that they made around Christmas time was disgusting, though....cinnamon and ginger and peppermint do NOT go together.) My new obsession is Green Tea, with Tetley making a Jasmine Green Tea that I have come to crave like heroin. Camomile, peppermint and strawberry tea are all delicious. But, my mother is once again, right, when she says that regular black tea is the best tea of all. Once, I bought some cheap tea in an effort to save, oh, 79 cents, and discovered that it wasn't worth the box it came in. Mom was once again, right, when she said "don't skimp on shoes or tea". She's partial to Tetley, and I bow to her wisdom.

Luckily, as addictions go, tea is cheap and legal and available and not high in calories, so I will happily succumb to that monkey on my back.