Kindred spirits

Starting around age 12, I developed an obsession with tea parties. I thus formed The Tea Party Guild, which also speaks to another healthy obsession I had with my Roget's Thesaurus. I came up with the name after looking up synonyms for "group." I considered "society," "gathering," and then ultimately decided on "guild" for the simple reason that it made me think of the Lollipop Guild in the Wizard of Oz. Which is a ridiculous leap, especially when you consider that I was truly aiming to be like Anne of Green Gables. I wanted nothing more than to gather my kindred spirits, use big words I didn't quite understand yet, and have an occasional afternoon of all things fanciful. If we happened to spill a little tea on the nice table cloth, launching us into an elaborate scheme to clean it before an adult noticed that evolved into a complicated web of not-so-clever cover-ups that ultimately led us to being caught red-handed, so be it. It would be such an Anne situation. And believe me, at that age, whatever I could do to be more like Anne Shirley, I did it (though I never found myself in any particular sticky situation).
"It's so easy to be wicked without knowing it, isn't it?" Oh Anne, you're adorable.

Fortunately, I had 4 very close girlfriends at the time who bought into my love of Green Gables and tea parties, and boy, oh boy, did we have fun. We dutifully rotated hostess responsibilities from house to house, and for each party we wore dresses andhats. I even scored a pair of short gloves from the old Emporium in Boise. As part of the guild membership, we banded together each Friday in wearing dresses and hats. Looking back, I'm not sure whether I was more blessed to have friends who did this with me, or classmates who did not ridicule us to our faces.

For our tea parties, we generally stuck to the simple Bigelow and Celestial Seasonings variety packs, but we also made goodies, like those fancy crustless tea sandwiches with cucumber and cream cheese, not to mention sweets like lemon bars, merigues, you name it. My parents had the perfect antique-y dining room, too, with plenty of mismatched tea cups featuring dainty gold embellishment. My mom helped by ironing one of her nicest table cloths, and even boiled the water for us once we had sat down adn began chatting (though don't think the trappings of the occasion were any indication of civilized grown-up talk; close your eyes and you could just as easy picture girls standing around their lockers, gossiping about crushes and who's going through puberty fastest).

ALL THIS IS TO SAY, I gave my 10-year-old niece a tea set that she could paint herself as a birthday present, and it is now all decorated and ready to use. She has requested a tea party on Saturday. We're spending the better party of the morning and afternoon together and my mind is already swooning with ideas of all the things we can bake and assemble and talk about. I am so excited, feeling like I was born to be an aunt with nieces to have tea parties with.

I. Can't. Wait.