This is the tea that made me start drinking (non-chai) black teas. A friend of mine was living in London at the time and she brought me a box of this tea as a present. I thought that it would be a chai-like tea, what with being a Christmas tea, so I tried it and it had the most gorgeous reddish colour… but it tastes like ‘normal’ black tea.
And then, of course, I refused to believe that I didn’t like this tea, because it’s really pretty tea from London, plus it’s from M&S and I kind of love them. So I just kept ‘trying’ the tea, and after a while I got accustomed to the taste and once all the tea was gone I really missed it. And then I bought one of those boxes of a few different Twinings teas and became very fond of their English breakfast and Irish breakfast teas, which then led to more Twinings teas and Barry’s teas and Yorkshire tea…. And that’s how I started drinking a bunch of black tea with milk and sugar, and then branched off into just pure black teas, then flavoured black teas…. good times :)
In any case, I’m living in London now and I was at M&S a few days ago and you can buy Christmas Tea again! It’s been years since I’ve had it, so I was very excited. And it still tastes great. Very assam-y and lovely as a breakfast tea. I’d say this is one of my favourite morning teas, along with Taylors’ Irish breakfast and Yorkshire tea. I remember also being very fond of Twinings breakfast teas, but they don’t have Irish breakfast for the UK market, fascinatingly enough, and the English one doesn’t taste the same. I’m planning to buy a box of each of the international market breakfasts at the Twinings shop/museum one of these days, but I’m trying to not go nuts with tea buying for a while…
Also, one of the things I like best about living in a country for more than a year are all those seasonal things that you notice coming back. Very homey. And yup, I’ve moved around a bit.
And yup, that’s about that.
