Yesterday my mom, grandma, little sister, and I got together for a tea. We haven't really done this in a while, for a lot of reasons, but we used to it with some regularity! It's a phenomenon that predates my blog, even. I'm sure we've been doing it for at least twenty years at this point. (I think I have only posted pictures of a tea once and that was almost ten years ago.) It's really an excuse for my mom and grandma to set a pretty table, which they adore! And of course we get to have little treats!
Any excuse for a tea will do. It doesn't have to have a theme. But you bet we have had Valentine's teas and Halloween teas and have had some very specific themes, such as the old Disney cartoon, The Reluctant Dragon. Our theme for this tea was The Sound of Music, specifically the song "My Favorite Things."
I inivted myself to use two of my Blythes as a centerpiece! As you can see, Olive and Tiphanie are the "girls in white dresses with blue satin sashes," and they happen to have "snowflakes that stay on my nose and eyelashes!" There are some flakes I punched out with one of those decorative paper punches that I stuck onto their faces and hair with small shreds of washi tape, and there are also tiny jewels I pressed on here and there, for additional effect! My mom made place cards that are "brown paper packages tied up with strings." And, I found some old fake roses that I've had for eons and stuck some of those itty bitty blingies to them, for "raindrops on roses."
This is the kind of theme we could have gone overboard with, trying to represent everything mentioned in the song. But we came up with the idea only a few days before the tea, so we just did what we had time to do!
My grandma hosted the tea in her tiny and very dark dining room, so mostly, my pictures didn't come out. I didn't take too many, either. I felt self-conscious making people move aside for me and stuff, and of course I had a heavy bias towards mostly just wanting to take pictures of my dolls, hahaha. I did not get any good pictures of the food; they just didn't turn out at all! The following couple of pictures are from my mom's phone:
The treats were pretty! There were petit fours from a bakery, tiny cinnamon rolls, cheese on wheat crackers, a few varities of tea sandwiches, scones (blueberry and cranberry orange), and fruit skewers. I don't drink tea so I had some cranberry juice, haha. And it was so hot that nobody wanted hot tea. Iced tea was served instead.
After the tea, we four ladies sat in the cool living room and had a family sing-along. So von Trapp. I know y'all are not surprised that we do this with regularity. While it does depend on who's present for the sing-along and who knows what songs, as to what gets sung, it's very often folk songs from the 60s ("Where Have All the Flowers Gone" and "Teach Your Children" and such) that older members of the family know, or other songs that at least a couple of us know and can sing through. And family songs, you know? For us, a family song would be "The Ugly Bug Ball" from Summer Magic. A beloved staple for us, but maybe not well-known to most.
You better believe we sang "Edelweiss," "My Favorite Things," and "Do-Re-Mi."
