Today's Tea Time

Ladies,

I have stopped for a cup of tea and gathered my thoughts that were flying around in my mind. It occurred to me that we can create substitutes for some things. Some of my friends who sew, like textiles and clothing designs, are disappointed in the Inaugural ball gowns. As we do not have royalty here, the inauguration was one of the posh things we looked forward to seeing, and so we were let down by our expectations.

In place of this we decided to dress up have our own events at home, or sketch and paint a portrayal of the gowns and tea time.  

This is the kind of thing we did on the old homesteads. I cannot tell you the amount of playing, writing and drawing we engrossed ourselves in that made the heavy dark winters seem light.  From catalogs we clipped and pasted room scenes into those dull scrapbooks made of brown paper that were the only things we could get at the time. We made paper dolls and learned to trace around them on colored paper for fancy dresses. In extreme poverty ourselves, we could have paper dolls with unlimited wardrobes, houses and furnishings. It absorbed our mimds so much that we forgot our circumstances.  Boys did similar things by cutting out pictures of cars, pastimg them on cardboard, creating stands for them, then playing with them on hand-drawn roads a d countrysides.

We dressed up in whatever we could find that seemed elegant, wrapping fabrics, scarves and old lace around us for our parties. Entertainment was a cinch when we provided our own speeches. It was not difficult to create a tea party, because in those days the cups and saucers were all made of fine china, even the ones used every day. I tell people I lived before the beaker or mug era 😌 because I remember almost to the day when the large mugs and coffee cups came in and the porcelain teacups went out.

Re-creating events to our own liking is creating our own memories and photographic moments for our personal histories.

The three pictures below depict tea on the Royal Scotsman, a luxury train:

Trains were a favorite playtime subject when we were children. We remember setting up the chairs and tables to resemble the i side of a train, made especially realistic when setting a row of chairs by the window and asking the passenger if he wanted a window seat. 

Below: we are in the middle of a rain and windstorm here. That tea on the train seems more appealing to me than going somewhere else!

Getting out yellow tea cups makes it feel more cheerful but it is quite a contrast to have hot tea in a comfortable place by a window looking at the fierce weather!