Creating Your Own Tea Ritual
From mint to rooibos to matcha, take the time to pour into yourself
I grew up on an island that remained a British colony until 1962, so of course tea was part of the ingrained routine of life. To break the fast in the morning? Tea. To calm your spirit after school or the workday? Tea. During the day as needed for a pick-me-up? You guessed it, tea! My mother is a born and raised tea fanatic, and she passed that energy along to me. There is no time of day that she won’t advise me to drink an “NCOT” as she calls it — a nice cup of tea.
“I don’t need a special time, whenever I just feel for it, I guess. Because it calms me,” she explains. I was raised to embrace tea in the same way, as a general panacea for frazzled nerves or a bad day. It wasn’t until I got older that I learned of the global impact of tea and developed a fascination with global tea rituals and traditions and began to appreciate that in my family, we had created our own.
Tea is one of the world’s most communal drinks, often enjoyed in formal and informal gatherings around the world. If you Google tea traditions or look up the search term on YouTube, you will immediately find a great deal of information about centuries-old cultural practices around the brewing of sencha or matcha tea in Japan as formal welcome ceremonies for special…
