Kimberley's Kyusu

The Festive season is almost here and of course, I like many of you out there want to combine my love of tea and Christmas together in the form of a tea advent Calander. There are some option out there for traditional tea lovers but they are very limited, some only ship within specific countries and others like the Fortnum’s one are incredible expensive, so there is no middle ground. To solve that problem I have decided to do what I have done every year since I cut flavoured teas out of my life and create my own tea advent full of the traditional teas that I love.

As you can probably tell by the title of this post the tea company I have chosen to use for this years advent calendar is Yunomi Tea and you all know that unlike Nio teas I am familiar with this brand, and have worked with them a lot over the years since I started my blog. So going into this I knew in advance what to expect from the teas and tisanes I was going to purchase, and went it this knowing that I was going to be able to put together an incredibly varied selection of Japanese teas for this advent calendar.

Yunomi do offer a good selection of tea samplers, I decided that rather than go for one of those that I wanted to pick each tea for the advent myself. So that I could make sure I was getting as varied a mix as possible and to ensure that some of my favourites from the last few years were included. Which mean that the element of surprise that comes with an advent calendar is minimised but it also means that I won’t be compiling teas that I would never drink.

Considering that most of my Japanese tea collection is made up of tea from Yunomi among others, I decided to purchase 17 samples and then use tea currently in my collection to make up the rest of those days. I just thought it would be the best way to use up some of the teas i already have. I’m not going to go into detail about every tea included in because I’ll (hopefully) be doing daily short videos on my Instagram & tik tok (@kimberleyskyusu) and would like to keep an element of surprise for that.

I tried to go for as broad of a mix as possible with the samples I purchased, some of them I have tried before but most of them are new to me. In the sense that I have tried that verity of tea before but not the specific tea from Yunomi. I spent a good amount of time trying to decided how to physically put the advent together I considered wrapping each tea but that would have produced too much waste. I considered a wooden re-useable advent to cut down on waste but I couldn’t find one with big enough draws for the samples to fit into. Then I stumbled across a D.I.Y advent kit online

Unlike the other options I had previously considered this one was was more minimalist with light wooden beams, white drawstring bags for each day, numbered only with a small black number and, cream coloured straight holding all together and last but by no means least top and the bottom were adorned with the most beautiful fake mistletoe with added glitter ”snow”.

I’m pretty happy with the final product overall and so excited to start counting down the days to my favourite holiday of the year with a delicious Japanese tea or tisanes at the start of each day. I love that my calendar this year is more or less zero waste and will continue to be so year after year because it has endless re-usability.

Are you making your own tea advent this year? How did you decide to put yours together? Let me know in the comments. If you decided to go in the other direction and purchase a tea advent from a specific company let me know which one(s) you went for. If you know of any advent calendars that feature only traditional teas that I might have overlooked please leave your suggestions in the comments so I can add them to my list and share them with other tea lovers.

Until next time, Happy Steeping

Kimberley