More pink tea today. This one is called Sleigh Ride, and the ingredients run the gamut from cooked rice and almonds to hibiscus. But when not conjuring irritating Christmassy earworms for us, all it really tastes of is the hibiscus. No surprise, since hibiscus is one of those herbal flavours that rapidly overwhelms everything. And while there’s probably a balance with any tea when it comes to steeping and strength, this one is particularly elusive. Four minutes in and the first cup was hot water, seven and it was only hibiscus.

It’s a flavour we associate with Latvia, probably because our academic daughter had a habit of gifting us hibiscus tea from her home village whenever she returned to town after the holidays. That’s primarily how we know hibiscus tea. It tastes warm and of friendship and is excellent for colds.

Sleigh Ride though, the name of the tea, is a bit different. We’ve already alluded to the music it triggers – there was a year when our younger brother was addicted to that particular carol and we heard nothing else for a month. But sleigh rides were also a staple of our holidays. Late spring, British Columbia trips skiing. The days were longer, but only by a little, and one evening out of the fortnight we’d put our names down for a sleigh ride. There were horses, and hot apple cider afterwards, but the best part was the miles and miles of client, snowy landscape. A difficult thing to do justice to in description. But here’s a poem that comes close to success.

A Winter Eden

Robert Frost

A winter garden in an alder swamp,
Where conies now come out to sun and romp,
As near a paradise as it can be
And not melt snow or start a dormant tree.

It lifts existence on a plane of snow
One level higher than the earth below,
One level nearer heaven overhead,
And last year’s berries shining scarlet red.

It lifts a gaunt luxuriating beast
Where he can stretch and hold his highest feat
On some wild apple tree’s young tender bark,
What well may prove the year’s high girdle mark.

So near to paradise all pairing ends:
Here loveless birds now flock as winter friends,
Content with bud-inspecting. They presume
To say which buds are leaf and which are bloom.

A feather-hammer gives a double knock.
This Eden day is done at two o’clock.
An hour of winter day might seem too short
To make it worth life’s while to wake and sport.

Today’s tea, drunk this afternoon, was a black tea that purported to taste of Red Velvet Cake. Accordingly, it was suitably rich, more dessert than breakfast tea. This was more or less as we expected; we still remember, after all, the days when our academic grandmother aspired to bake red velvet cake. The trick, as per her recipe book, was to lean in hard to the richness of the cake. Never to use margarine when it called for butter, or milk instead of cream. It worked for her. The tea was like that too; creamy and full-bodied, unapologetic in its luxuriance.

The same academic grandmother was responsible for the founding of what was then the Poetry and Cake Society. We met, a moveable feast, at a different house each week. Read aloud, drank tea and baked for one another. Nothing so indulgent as red velvet cake, to our memory, though courgette cake was quite thing in the society’s last year or so.

We were thinking of this over tea, it being about the time when Poetry and Cake would hold its Christmas party. We think we’ve told you a bit about some of the games. Guess the Rhyme, for instance, was the favourite. There was another, unnamed, where we had to justify a dislike of one famous poet and a taste for an overlooked one. The less expected the answer, the higher your score. We did terribly. Such are the hazards of narrowly focusing on the Romantics. But we did once confess to a certain amount of disinterest in Cummings. The lack of capitals, you know, irritate us. Far too obvious an answer.

But then, in rewatching The Hour the other evening, we realised that, as with every other rule, this one had an exception. So here, with no more regard for capitalisation than red velvet cake has for calories, is the one bit of Cummings to really win us over.

Somewhere I have never travelled gladly beyond

e.e. cummings

somewhere i have never travelled, gladly beyond
any experience your eyes have their silence:
in your most frail gesture are things which enclose me,
or which i cannot touch because they are too near

your slightest look easily will unclose me
though i have closed myself as fingers,
you open always petal by petal myself as Spring opens
(touching skilfully, mysteriously)her first rose

or if your wish be to close me ,i and
my life will shut very beautifully, suddenly,
as when the heart of this flower imagines
the snow carefully everywhere descending;

nothing which we are to perceive in this world equals
the power of your intense fragility:whose texture
compels me with the colour of its countries,
rendering death and forever with each breathing

(i do not know what it is about you that closes
and opens; only something in me understands
the voice of your eyes is deeper than all roses)
nobody, not even the rain, has such small hands

Over 14 years of school, we had all of two snow days. This was in Toronto, Ontario, where we walked home in drifts up to our pink knees and it was uphill both ways. So, naturally, we laughed appreciably when, in 2018, we were delayed in the return to Scotland by centimetres of snow. We seem to remember Wales was well and properly snowbound, but London was dusted lightly, and still it ground to a halt. It was eleven before we regained St Andrews, and the first time the British Rail service properly betrayed us. The makings of a great and lasting relationship, that.

We’re thinking about all of this in light of today’s tea, dubbed Snow Day. We’re not sure exactly what those taste like, having, as we say, limited experience, but we didn’t reckon on chocolate and mint. More peppermint than chocolate in this case, too. This is odd only inasmuch as a quick look at the ingredients would suggest this should be the other way round. Still, we’d rather the peppermint, and as an uncaffinated cap to the evening, it does what it says on the tin. We like it fine, you understand, but there have been more interesting teas in this Advent Calendar. To us it tastes like any agreeable mint tea.

But in keeping with the spirit if the thing, here’s a poem by Billy Collins. We knew him first through The Writers’ Almanac, whereon was recited his ‘Reasons I Do Not Keep a Gun in the House.’ It still makes us laugh, but as we now live with the Dachshunds, posting it would probably be disloyal. Instead, here’s a theme and variation on the tea. You can tell us if it’s anything like the reality.

Snow Day

Billy Collins

Winter in Canada. It’s here now, the snow on the ground, and the chill in the air. It was book club this evening, and breakfast with relatives downtown, all of which meant walking across the city in boots. As ever, this time of year, we find ourselves wondering what it is about winter boots that seems to find them without arch support. Or maybe it’s something we do to them. Either way, we’ve been acutely aware of it ever since we took up dancing. Suffice it to say we miss the days of mizzling, Scottish winters. The haar, the rime, and the bleakly grey mornings. At least we could run everywhere in ordinary shoes.

But we’re in Ontario, documenting the creeping start of one if our milder winters. after last year, anything above -20 would feel mild. Still, we have a tradition of magnificent winters, and in the course of nursing tonight’s Nuts and Spices Oolong we’ve stumbled across a poet that felt the need to render them lyrical.

The tea, incidentally, is more spice than nuts. Not surprising, since we’re still fuzzy on how exactly essence of peanut would diffuse into an oolong. We can vouch for the presence of the peanuts though; they’re jolly hard to get into a tea infuser. Muse on the how and why of all that while reading through this description of Ontario winter. It’s nothing like the Scottish Decembers we miss, but it’s spot-on for Canada.

How One Winter Came in the Lake Region

Wilfred Campbell

For weeks and weeks the autumn world stood still,
Clothed in the shadow of a smoky haze;
The fields were dead, the wind had lost its will,
And all the lands were hushed by wood and hill,
In those grey, withered days.
Behind a mist the blear sun rose and set,
At night the moon would nestle in a cloud;
The fisherman, a ghost, did cast his net;
The lake its shores forgot to chafe and fret,
And hushed its caverns loud.
Far in the smoky woods the birds were mute,
Save that from blackened tree a jay would scream,
Or far in swamps the lizard’s lonesome lute
Would pipe in thirst, or by some gnarlèd root
The tree-toad trilled his dream.
From day to day still hushed the season’s mood,
The streams stayed in their runnels shrunk and dry;
Suns rose aghast by wave and shore and wood,
And all the world, with ominous silence, stood
In weird expectancy:
When one strange night the sun like blood went down,
Flooding the heavens in a ruddy hue;
Red grew the lake, the sere fields parched and brown,
Red grew the marshes where the creeks stole down,
But never a wind-breath blew.
That night I felt the winter in my veins,
A joyous tremor of the icy glow;
And woke to hear the north’s wild vibrant strains,
While far and wide, by withered woods and plains,
Fast fell the driving snow

In unrelated trivia, Campbell was an Anglican priest before he was a poet of Canadian winter. We’d never heard of him prior to this evening, and we rather wish now we could talk Advent with him over a cup of oolong. This one is particularly good, nuts or no, and we have a feeling he’d speak our particular liturgical language.

The calendar that isn’t Advent related would appear to be stuck on an Apple theme. Tonight it was Forever Nuts, a well-balanced herbal blend of apple, raisins, and as the name would hint, nuts. It’s a good tea, one we always keep a stock of. Shockingly pink, as we perennially observe when it bobs up jack-in-the-box fashion behind a door, but warm and autumnal tasting. A lovely shock of colour for grey days and rainy days, dreich spells and snow.

Also perennial is Thomas Hardy, it seems. Inevitably we dip into his poetry at least once through the Advent cycle. And every year we comment on the metre, how musical and playful it is. There are things he does rhythmically that no one else risks doing. Here’s an autumnal poem for an autumnal tea. No nuts -we did lo looking for literary ones – but there’s that feeling of looming endings and waning light that comes with Advent.

The Later Autumn

Thomas Hardy

Gone are the lovers, under the bush
Stretched at their ease;
Gone the bees,
Tangling themselves in your hair as they rush
On the line of your track,
Leg-laden, back
With a dip to their hive
In a prepossessed dive.

Toadsmeat is mangy, frosted, and sere;
Apples in grass
Crunch as we pass
And rot ere the men who make cyder appear.
Couch-fires abound
On fallows around,
And shades far extend
Like lives soon to end.

Spinning leaves join the remains shrunk and brown
Of last year’s display
That lie wasting away,
On whose corpses they earlier as scorners gazed down
From their aery green height:
Now in the same plight
They huddle; while yon
A robin looks on.