A tea to warm the soul: Yorkshire Gold Tea with Ginger

The rush of Christmas is over and I'm finally able to settle in to get a few things done around the house. I've been puttering around at a slower pace, thanks to a long, 4-day weekend. I love these little stretches of vacation time between work days, first for Christmas and now for New Years. It allows time to rest and rejuvenate and get my creative juices flowing. I've been stationed at my laptop for a couple of days now, finishing up my December Daily photo book. My Mom and I did one last year and carried on the tradition for this year. We each documented our daily activities from December 1 through December 25 and exchanged the books when we were done (we made a copy to keep and a copy to share). I had gotten the idea from a couple of bloggers, Ali Edwards and Cathy Zielske, who fall into the category of "extreme scrapbookers". Check out their blogs if you're into scrapbooking or memory keeping. They are guaranteed to inspire. This year, I've created mine using Shutterfly. I find that it's a quick and convenient way of putting photos together into an attractive book. Last year, I went the old-fashioned, cut-and-paste route with scrapbook paper, rubber stamps and printed photos. It was very time-consuming and I knew that if I wanted to do it again this year in a timely manner, I would need to find a faster way for my sanity's sake. Behold, I bring you Christmas 2012:




Thanks to a rare Christmas Day snow, I was able to capture the perfect photos for the cover:


These photos make me shiver just looking at them. Since it's been colder, I've been making more hot tea, which brings me to the point of this post -- Yorkshire Gold tea:

A friend introduced me to this tea a couple of years ago and it's really great on its own. It is a nice and bold black tea. However, I had some candied ginger, so I chopped some and added it to the tea to provide a little more warmth and some little bits to nibble on after the tea is gone. I love the candied ginger, with its sweet and spicy bite.


This tea really warms the soul.