Advent tea 3: lemon, ginger and manuka honey

About fifteen years ago I went to see an acupuncturist. He had been recommended to me and he was supposed to be really good. I went to see him because I had problems with my neck and shoulders. He asked me a lot of stuff and I told him that we were struggling with infertility and maybe in due course I would ask him to look into that too. He immediately started working on the infertility issue, saying that with that solved I would also heal from other stuff. And I was vulnerable and sad and said okay. Which is not how it should have gone. But on the other hand I felt that maybe he was right and I might as well at that point. And so I went to see him every week and he burned some stuff around and on me – I forgot what that was called and can’t be bothered to look it up – and stuck some needles in me and then he left me alone for a bit. Which was kind of nice, having a while by myself. He also told me to drink ginger tea, which would warm me up and make me more welcoming for a kid.

I’m going to be honest with you here: I don’t like ginger. At all. I shuddered at the thought but I went ahead and bought some ginger tea and tried to drink it. It didn’t go down well.

Several years later we were finally able to welcome our daughters into the world, but by then I had moved on and not seen the acupuncturist anymore for years. Let’s say the needles thing did not work for me. I didn’t go back for my back and shoulders either.

Lemon, ginger and manuka honey

So I don’t like ginger much. And I don’t like lemon in my tea either. Honey… I can do honey but I prefer sugar in my tea. It also has turmeric, which I don’t like except in Asian dishes – much like ginger, in fact. Ergo: this is not a tea I would have chosen for myself. But the beauty of the advent calendar is that it (also) teaches that, well, you get what you get. And it is supposed to be warming, and I could use some of that because winter is hitting the Netherlands and I am pretty much cold morning to night. (The acupuncturist could have been right about that bit at least.)

It was okay. It was certainly more outspoken than the teas before this one. Small wonder because there are a lot of flavours packed into one tea bag: ginger, licorice root (again!), elderflower, sweet fennel seed, lemon verbena leaf, turmeric root, lemon essential oil, whole lemon (?!!), lemon myrthle leaf, manuka honey flavour. That is ten ingredients! Were they all necessary?

It was kind of nice to try this one out. Although it brought back a memory from a less-than-perfect time in my life, it was nice to try it. There are bound to be more gingery teas in this calendar, of course. I still look forward to them.

(I didn’t ‘sing loud’. The tea may have.)