A New Year with Tea and Friends

Well, Christmas has come and gone...


...and very merry it was too, with perfect weather and much fun (despite the sleep deprivation associated with having a young baby) with family and friends. I felt particularly lucky that little Pippin was discharged from hospital with a clean bill of health well in time for Christmas Day.

Today is New Year's Day and I chose my first pot of tea for the day (and year and decade!) to celebrate something very important to me, which I've come to appreciate more and more over the last few months in particular: my Tea Friends.


This tea is a high mountain oolong sent to me by my friend Peichi, whom I met through Etsy when I adopted Lucky Pinky Dots (who will be making more appearances this year, I promise). Peichi sent the tea to me from California; she received it from her parents who sent it to her from Taiwan. Today I used up the last of it, feeling so lucky to have made such a kind friend on the other side of the world.

I recently finished reading 'Tea: Addiction, Exploitation and Empire' by Roy Moxham which left me with a feeling of great sadness at the bloody history of tea, its cultivation and consumption. It also left me with a sense of amazement at the power of these leaves to affect peoples' lives in so many diverse ways: commercially, spiritually, health-wise. It has affected mine in only positive ones, I'm pleased to say, and none is more important than the way it has inspired me to seek out others who share a love of tea.

I have connected with these wonderful people via their blogs, their tweets and their shops (and I thank my lucky stars for the interwebs every day too, of course - none of this would be possible without that!) and my life is so much richer for these connections. Thank you all for sharing tea with me throughout the past year. I'm looking forward very much to continuing to learn about, and even more importantly enjoy, tea with you all in the coming months.

Here's to tea and friendship in 2010!