Tea

“Come along inside…We’ll see if tea and buns can make the world a better place.”

Kenneth Grahame; The Wind in the Willows

The tea party is a staple of children’s literature. In The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe, Lucy, on her first visit to Narnia, sits down to tea with the faun, Mr. Tumnus; in The House on Pooh Corner, Pooh and Piglet share a Very Nearly Tea (which is one you forget about afterwards) with Christopher Robin; and in Alice in Wonderland, Alice stumbles upon a peculiar and philosophically challenging tea party hosted by the maddening Mad Hatter.

January, it turns out, is National Hot Tea Month, which makes perfect sense: it’s cold outside and we’re all thinking longingly of curling up in woolly slippers with a cup of something warm. Best of all, there are many mind-broadening resources – literary, geographical, historical, philosophical, and scientific – to make the experience even better.

TEA STORIES

	In Rosemary Wells’s Ruby’s Tea for Two (Viking Juvenile Books, 2003) – featuring Max and Ruby, possibly the world’s most adorable bunny siblings – Ruby and a friend are having a tea party for two and insist that Max be the waiter.  (“Three!” protests Max.) For ages 1-4.
	In Judith Kerr’s The Tiger Who Came to Tea (Candlewick, 2009), just as Sophie and her Mummy are sitting down to tea, a hungry and rambunctious tiger arrives who eats and drinks everything in the house, including all the biscuits and Daddy’s beer. For ages 3-7.
	David Kirk’s Miss Spider’s Tea Party (Scholastic, 2007) is the tale of an almost-failed tea party: none of the insects want to attend since they all know what spiders eat. Eventually, however, one wet and stranded moth breaks the ice and the book ends with a crowd of insectile guests happily sharing tea and cupcakes. For ages 4-8.
	Allen Say’s Tea with Milk (Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2009) is the story of young Masako – known as May – raised in San Francisco and then moved as a teenager to Japan. There Masako struggles to find her place between her two cultures, each represented throughout the book by tea – either American-style, with milk and sugar, or plain, green, and Japanese. Eventually the independent-minded May meets a young Japanese man who likes milk in his tea too, and at the very end of the book, readers discover that these are the author’s parents. For ages 5-10.
	Should you drink your tea with milk? Maybe not, according to the New York Times. Check out Adding Milk to Tea Destroys its Antioxidants.
	Lindsey Tate’s Teatime with Emma Buttersnap (Henry Holt, 1998) is a delightful and wide-ranging account of tea with the help of Emma’s well-informed English Aunt Pru, a tea aficionado. (Aunt Pru’s cats, Lapsang Souchang and Jasmine, are named after her favorite teas.) The book includes a brief history of tea, instructions for brewing tea, recipes, and an account of the Boston Tea Party. For ages 7-9.

TEA POEMS

	Eileen Spinelli’s Tea Party Today (Boyds Mills Press, 1999) is a collection of short clever illustrated poems about teatime, including “Please” – an account of tea-party manners – which features a mischievous little boy who (horrors!) sticks his finger in his teacup. For ages 4-8.
	Joyce Carol Thomas’s Brown Honey in Broomwheat Tea (HarperCollins, 1995), for ages 4-9, is a lovely collection of poems celebrating African-American heritage, among them the title poem, “Brown Honey in Broomwheat Tea.” (“Broomwheat tea: good for what ails you, especially when poured by loving hands…”). For ages 4-8.