All Best Wishes

I should have known something was amiss when I recently had to mail in my Grace Tea order to Massachusetts instead of New York.  "Hmmm..."  I thought.  "Perhaps they moved out of the City to save money, after all, times are tough and why should tea be any different?"  Thinking no more about it I sent in my order.


It arrived today.  Something was wrong.  Very wrong.


I have been buying from Grace Tea (which used to go by Grace Rare Tea) for at least 20 years now.  I no more remember the exact date than I remember how I originally found them.  I have never ordered much, I am the only tea drinker in the house and the rest of my family of origin either drinks black swill...er...coffee or is not as 'into' tea as am I.  But I have faithfully ordered once or twice a year for what seems to me to be forever.  I anxiously await that day when the mail fairy flies down the wood stove flue singing, sprinkling tea dust, and presents me with my package.  Or something like that.  It is always an exciting day nonetheless.


Each order, of course, included a packing slip.  What made this packing slip different, and what impressed me from the first, was the tiny little greeting hand written at the bottom:  "All Best Wishes, Marguerite Sanders".  Marguerite Sanders was the owner.


Now, being the New Yorkophile that I am, I was so very impressed with the OWNER of a company in NEW YORK who bothered to personally sign each and every packing slip.  Who does that?  Who did it then?  Who does it now?


Apparently no one any more.


When I opened my package, and the tea appears as wonderful as always, the packing slip was different:  no more regular paper but thin, mechanized packing slip paper, and,


NO GREETING.  NO SIGNATURE.


That's a cold halibut upside the head if ever there was one.  Well, for me anyway.  Inside was a photocopied letter, with a photocopied signature, stating, "As one of the new owners of Grace Tea Company..."  New owners?  No more All Best Wishes?  No more Marguerite?  No goodbye?  After 20 years of being wished all the best, I felt as though I had been sent a Dear Jan letter.


Little did I realize how much those biannual greetings had come to mean.  I always looked for them and then, of course, never thought about them again until the next order arrived. It made me feel as though I had a friend in New York.  A friend I had never met, never spoken to, and never would, but still...we did write twice a year!  In a way - okay, a business sort of way - but wrote nonetheless.


Now it is all over.  I suppose it was time; the Sanders bought the company in 1979.  Thirty one years.  And I bought from them for 20 of those years.  But they were not the first owners - the company started 20 years prior to that.  And perhaps the new people will be just fine.  At one time the Sanders were the new people and I assume the old customers were a bit put out by whatever changes they inevitably made.  But I will sorely miss that personal touch one woman gave to each and every customer - a touch that is now nearly extinct in the world with the passing of the Sanders reign at Grace Tea.


So I think I will try to pick up the ball here.  I have nothing to sell and perhaps even less to say.  But I will send each and every one of you


All Best Wishes.

Lord, have mercy

It is Lent.  For the Orthodox it is an intense time of prayer and fasting.  We are (technically) vegan until Pascha, which happens to be the same as Western Easter this year (and next).  It also seems to be an intense time...period.  Things get overwhelming quickly.  Which is my long apology, mostly to myself since no one reads this, as to why I don't write as I had wanted to on this blog.  Oh well, there is always April...

Kifle (or Kiflice) for the Unintiated

We grew up with Christmas Kifle.  My Aunt Helen used to make oodles of it.  We would sneak into the kitchen at her house where they were beautifully displayed on a tiered rack.  Mom would tell us "Two apiece!  Only take two each!"  And we dutifully obeyed.

Until she left the kitchen.

Now, she was not silly enough to leave us with the kifle unattended.  Oh, no.  She would make sure she shooed all four of us out of the kitchen in front of her.  We would wait - a pride of lions stalking their prey - and do our best to appear engrossed in the Serbian conversations we could not understand since we were not taught the language.  Then the signal from the lookout that mom's attention was diverted - the signal usually just slipping back into the kitchen.  The rest would move quickly (afraid the lookout would bogart most of them) and, hamstringing the tiered tray, inhale as many kifle as we could without being too obvious which we probably were anyway.  I imagine we looked (and sounded) like puppies fighting over a too-small bowl of kibble.

We would then artfully arrange the survivors so the tray didn't look too decimated and rush back out.  Stealth was not so much called for as speed.  We had to be quick, not quiet.  Aunt Helen knew exactly what was happening and would never stop us - she apparently had plenty of kifle in reserve.

Today we don't make kifle as often as we should.  It has been a few years since our last batch.  I informed my niece that she needed to learn to make kifle as she needed to familiarize herself with the pain and suffering of her Serbian ancestry.  Coincidentally, she came up from Fresno "too late" to make some.

There is always her birthday...

http://www.recipezaar.com/Kifle-Yugoslavian-Walnut-Cookies-307432

New Year 2010

Well, welcome to 2010.  Our church year began three months ago, and that is the important one to me, so I am ambivalent about this one.  And have we decided to call it Twenty-ten yet?  Instead of Two Thousand and Ten?  I am guessing we will...