Still affordable, still healthy
Resurgence in tea parties taking hold in Cape Breton
People in Cape Breton are making a beeline straight to Granny's china cabinet. In these times when everything is more expensive, folks are discovering the economical joys of a simpler life and simpler times.
It seems like the price of everything has gone up over the last four years. And so, we have begun to seek out less complicated ways of finding peace and joy. Those adages we grew up with about companionship, friendship and community being so much more important to our health and well-being than material riches ring true in our hearts and minds now.
Have you had a tea lately? And was it a tea in a pretty china cup while you were surrounded by friends for an hour or so?
In this world when we can’t afford to live as before because of the cost of living, smart folks are turning to the eons-old tradition of hosting friends and family while huddled around a teapot and sipping peacefully from pretty tea cups of all shapes and colours.
Eight years ago, Whitney Pier resident Donna Cooper felt the need to introduce the time-honoured tradition of the formal tea to a whole new generation of younger people. She began a business, Elegant Tableware Rentals, out of her home.
“My goal was to bring back the cup and saucer,” said Cooper. “Everyone has them in the backs of their cupboards and wasn’t using them.”
“I felt like I was preaching – ‘Get those out and use them!'”
Through her business website and Facebook page, Cooper provides beautiful table settings for any occasion. She has set tables in people’s homes for everything from small birthday parties to baby showers and small weddings and just afternoon get-togethers with friends. She has enough stock to set up tables in community halls for events and fundraisers. She provides everything from tea and coffee urns and tablecloths to tiered dessert plates. She even offers to create the table centrepieces.
Her budget-friendly prices start at $35 for a table of 10. And she and her husband, Gary, will deliver it all for free.
“Affordable prices were a conscious choice for me,” she said. “It is important to me that everyone can have this experience.”
The high point of her work is when she introduces the concept of the tea party to school students of all ages.
“Kids have hot chocolate in tea cups. They hold the cups
in their two hands as if they are something precious. And I have found that the children are always kind, polite and so sweet.”
If the popularity of the “high tea” has waxed and waned, tea itself has never gone out of style. The world's oldest tea remains found in China dated 453-410 BC.
Here in Cape Breton, memories of Rita’s Tea Room in Big Pond are still clear in our minds. The afternoon drive out for tea and maybe a package of fudge to bring home is much missed. In an interview, internationally acclaimed singer Rita McNeil said the following about the back story of her tea house:
“Whenever I extended the invitation for people to come and see me in Cape Breton for a cup of tea, they came. I’d had an idea in the back of my mind for a long time: the dream of opening a tea room in Big Pond. ... We had nothing to get it started, so I took my Zellers card and went shopping. ... And we put out the word that we needed teacups and people came by with all kinds of them. Some were delicate, the china so thin we could almost see through it. Others were covered with tiny flowers. Some were painted gold, some pink, some blue. There were real treasures among them but more precious was the fact that people gave them to us so freely.” (From "On a Personal Note," Rita MacNeil)
And of course, there is a proper etiquette to drinking tea that contributes to the peacefulness of it all. According to the internet, if you are sitting at a table, “the proper manner to drink tea is to raise the tea cup, leaving the saucer on the table, and to place the cup back on the saucer between sips. It's considered rude to look anywhere but into the cup whilst sipping tea, and absolutely no slurping!”
I suspect there are a few slurpers among Cape Bretoners. And I’m a cookie-dunker when by myself, which is no doubt a disdainful practice among tea-drinking purists.
In these days of anxiety and uncertainty about so many things in life, we should all take the time to sit and sip. And remember – it’s never good to drink alone!