Day 3- The 24 Days of Christmas Miracles Campaign (Or "Hap-tea Holidays!")

This tea might not look like a deadly assassin- but looks
can be deceiving!

So, I will try not to report only about Christmas miracles that are food related, but a lot of them do seem to be. Today’s Christmas miracle is not about food, exactly, but rather is about beverages. Today I felt good when I woke up, but I was pretty tired. For the first 45 minutes of the day I met with a very sweet fourth grade girl to work on math. Well, I was so tired during that time that I was having to do this thing where I hold my eyes wide open, like I am staring, because if I don’t do that then my eyes just close, and before you know it my head starts nodding, and then I fall asleep momentarily, and THEN my head jerks and, as you can imagine, it is all very awkward, plus, probably not something you want your child’s teacher doing. Well somehow I made it through our 45 minutes without the awkward head nod and jerk happening, but I knew that I would have to do something to wake myself up if I wanted to be conscious for the very long meeting I had to attend at 11:45.

I went down to the teacher’s lounge to get some tea. I was delighted that there did not appear to be any pies, cakes, cookies, scones, biscotti, candies, truffles, or pastries in the lounge. I don’t normally drink things with caffeine in them (I gave up caffeine a couple of years ago and I had—no lie—a headache for a month when I did! But that’s a story for another time…). Anyway, I decided to drink a little caffeinated tea today so that I didn’t fall asleep while I was supposed to be supervising children. I shudder to think of the things that could happen if I were sleeping in a room full of third, fourth, or fifth graders. I dug through the cabinet that holds the tea until I found a tin of holiday tea in the back of the cabinet. The fact that the tea was in the back should have given me a hint that it was probably not the newest tea in there, but, seduced by the fancy packaging, I threw caution to the wind.

I put my cup under the Keurig machine and brewed some hot water, then stuck one of the holiday tea bags into the cup. The tea bag was made of this light, mesh material and looked quite extravagant; much nicer than an ordinary teabag. It made me feel all sophisticated and stuff. At about that time another teacher came in and saw the holiday tea tin and mentioned to me that the tin might be old. I responded that, although the tea might be from last holiday season, it is not every day that your tea comes in sachets rather than teabags, and that I was going to take a chance on it. It was like that tin of tea was sitting there crooning some Abba to me.

I then sweetened the tea using Splenda and, you know what? It really wasn’t as delicious as the packaging had led me to believe it would be. Also, it tasted a little funny. I began to deduce that perhaps the holiday tea was at least a year old, if not two years old. As I drank the last of the tea, a silent scream escaped my lips. Surely I would soon perish from imbibing this past-its-prime percolation! I waited for what seemed like an hour and, what do you know? A Christmas miracle occurred! You better believe that I did not actually die from drinking two-year-old tea! Obviously there was no bad fortune brewing, and I would live on to see another day of the holiday season. It was tea-riffic!