Winter Wonderland Tea

I hope you’re all having a lovely holiday! I’m working on a Christmas recap post but for today I’m just going to share some pics from a little tea lunch my daughter and I hosted. We have a yearly tradition of sharing a holiday teatime with my sister-in-law and niece and another friend and her daughter. The girls don’t get to see each other much during the school year so it’s a sweet time to catch up with everyone while munching and sipping on delicious holiday yummies!

We actually had this Winter Wonderland-themed tea planned with this group for last January 2022 but illness among half our group cancelled those plans. Since my girl and I already had most of the supplies gathered, we just packed them away which made it easy to throw together this year. We had found some great after-Christmas deals last year since this tea was planned for January.

I wanted the table to have a snowy-glowy vibe. We live in the deep south so if we want snow, we have to use our imaginations, ha! We found the snow-white furry table runner for 90% off at Hobby Lobby after Christmas last year. Y’all, it’s so soft and luxurious we couldn’t keep our hands off it! I kept waiting for it to meow or purr because it’s that soft and silky.

I had my daughter bring in one of our porch lanterns and clean it off and we placed it on an icy-looking wreath with a few bells.

I really didn’t want to crowd the table, but I felt like it needed a few glowy candles, so I got some glass votive candles from my cabinet, brushed on some Mod Podge, and rolled them in glitter for a frosty look. I wanted them to look like luminaries sitting in snow.

I got the dishes for Christmas last year and I adore them! They’re Johnson Brothers Old Britain Castles. I broke up the pattern just a tad by using my white everyday salad plates in between the dinner plate and bowl.

I didn’t get a good photo of the chandelier, but you can see a little from this pic below that I hung my glass icicles above our heads even though “those things have been known to kill people, Ralphie!”

For a gift to go with our wintry theme, we hung a creamy white scarf on each chair for our guests to take with them and wear during these chilly winter months. Last year, when we were planning the original tea party, I purchased them from Old Navy right after Christmas for $7 each! I could not pass that up. They are so soft and go with any outfit!

Ok, now for the food! I’ll just share the menu today but will soon follow up with the recipes in another post.

Winter Wonderland Tea

Vichyssoise with Toasted Baguette

Ham & Three-Cheese Quiche with Winter Salad

Scones: Orange Cranberry White Chocolate, Eggnog, & Chocolate Peppermint

Tea Blends: Nutcracker Sweet, Snowflake, & Eggnog

We usually do like our favorite tearooms and serve scones first, then the savory course(s), and then finish with dessert. However, since I knew we’d all indulged in so many holiday sweets this month, I decided to cut out the dessert course and just serve our scones at the end. To me the scones are the best part of teatime anyway (other than the tea itself) so I figured this would be ending on a high note.

For our first course we served Vichyssoise which is just a fancy-schmancy name for potato-leek soup, but it’s a lot of fun to say and with a French accent, of course.

We followed our soup with a Ham and 3-Cheese Quiche and a Winter Salad. More on these recipes in another post but they were delicious and will definitely be on repeat all winter long. We wrapped up our teatime with more hot tea and warm scones right out of the oven along with orange curd and clotted cream, the perfect ending to warm our guests before going back out in the cold on their way home.

Keeping enough hot tea on the table with a group can be a little tricky, especially when serving more than one blend, but with some trial and error I think I’ve finally come up with a system. I set up a little tea brewing station in the kitchen with the tea leaves already measured in bags, an electric kettle of water which heats to boiling in about a minute, a large measuring cup, and labeled tea pots. When I saw that a teapot was getting low of its blend, I’d slip to the kitchen and steep another pot with my tea bags and hot water that were ready to go.

Before I go, I have one more bargain to share with you. I got these snowflake teapots and pitcher for 90% off at Hobby Lobby last year and only paid under $10 for all 3! I used the pitcher for our ice water.

Besides the mothers and daughters that gather for tea, there’s one other little lady that enjoys a good teatime and that’s our Lady Pumpercot! Earlier that morning, I spotted her hiding in the dining room chair, keeping watch at the window. I snapped this cute photo of her and then forgot about her……..until our guests arrived and one of the ladies pulled a chair out to sit at the table and found this purring, furry little seat warmer. Pumpkin is such a gentle kitty that I’ve just always imagined her as a proper English lady so it’s no surprise that she would feel at home at our tea table. Well, at least my friend is a cat lover herself and thought it was really cute. We all had a good laugh over it!

I’m a little sentimental writing this post–not sad, just treasuring the memories from this and years past. We started this special tradition with this group back when all the girls were homeschooling and now one is married, two are in college, and one is in her senior year of high school. Life changes and kids grow up—in fact, our oldest couldn’t make it this year— but that’s okay because we’ll always have our sweet teatime memories to cherish forever.