A Cup of Tea

Oprah had a show on recently(?)...I don't really know when because I just look at her website, very rarely do I actually catch an episode of Oprah anymore...totally sidetracked there. Anyways, Oprah did have a show where she discussed how she enjoyed a cup of tea. She has the full on tea set approach. It looks beautiful. Me, I'm more into the comfort tea approach. I like my tea in a big mug. I do have a beautiful tea set that I've used sparingly and will one day reside in a hutch that I do not yet have, but that tea set is for company formal tea tea. My everyday comfort tea is completely different. During the school year my morning tea is usually toted off with me in a go cup, and I have my comfort tea at night and on weekend mornings. My comfort tea is usually served in a big mug. (hee hee, I just fixed my typo there that had me drinking out of a bug mug...wouldn't that be funny). Big Mugs must be part of the BC girl in me that is still hanging on as I live in the Maritimes. My first big mug I fell in love with at a local craft store in Abbotsford. It's handpainted with a sun on one side and moon on the other. And my collection just grew from there. I have a large blue one that could double as a soup bowl, I have a pretty blue one that was a gift from my friend Taryn and then there is my Starbucks collection. You can blame my mom for this one. Which in turn you could blame my brother for because he started her off on hers. The Starbucks collection is an assortment of city mugs that you can only purchase if you are in that particular city. The first of these entered our cupboard as a result of our fist trip to England 4 years ago. We thought we would pick up a mug for my mom's collection for a Christmas gift and while we were at it Jonathan picked up one for himself (pretty nice, it has Will Shakespeare featured on it). Since then we've added Vancouver and New York (we bought), Seattle and San Francisco (mom bought for us) and my latest hails from Boston. I have a couple of other hanging around too, one Jonathan bought me for Valentine's Day that's so pretty and one that showed up for one of us around Christmas time last year that I've adopted as my standard. It's red. It's funny now these big mugs are my norm. With everything else that's become supersized I've become irrated (you know what used to be a large is now a medium and so on) except when it comes to my comfort mug of tea. That has the opposite effect. If I'm having tea somewhere and they haven't yet adopted the big mug attutude I really do wonder if that's it. Strange.