As a child, my mother gave me tea to soothe sore throats. I never really enjoyed it much—it was a grown up thing– and that’s what I liked best about it.

When I went to college, my mother let me take a big mug with me. I used it once and found it three months later: filled with mold on a top shelf next to my bunk bed. Gross!  Obviously tea wasn’t quite my thing, however, until I studied abroad in Scotland.

In Scotland, I drank tea every day. Multiple cups of tea in fact– with milk, without milk,  but never lemon in Scotland. I met friends out for cups or tea, or had friends ‘round to the flat for tea. I ended up marrying a man from Scotland and stayed. I now have a cup of tea at least three times a day, more if necessary, especially in the winter.

When I first came here, I just had normal tea. I’ve branched out a bit now: Earl Grey, Lady Grey, Peppermint, Spearmint, Green teas. Tea is so much part of life here that when someone visits, you don’t ask if they want something to drink, as in water. You automatically say, “I’ll put the kettle on,” or if you’re on the ball, you’ve already turned it on. Yep—electric kettles are common place here.

When I was home last winter, I had a cup of Constant Comment in my mother’s kitchen, sitting on the same bar stool that I had sat on as a child, and I appreciated that cup of warmth and conversation a wee bit more than I did as a child.

Alice

Living in Scotland via Virginia

By the time I appreciated my dad’s passion for a good cup of hot tea, I had lived away from home for 18 years. During his last month of life, I was lucky enough to be with him 24-7. In the wee hours of the morning, when neither of us could sleep, we shared many cups of Constant Comment® and talked about the most wonderful things… memories of childhood (his and mine), the changing seasons, what happens after death, and endless minutia that only matters to a father and daughter. Now, when I find myself brewing a pot of Constant Comment®, I can’t help but smile at the warm memories of my dad that fill my heart and soul when I smell that steamy citrus aroma.

By Colleen Hyde

I have been enjoying Constant Comment® tea since 1973 when I was fortunate enough to get my first after school job at our local public library in a small town in New England. I came in at three o’clock and worked until six-thirty in the children’s book room. The library was an old Victorian mansion formerly owned by a local family at the turn of the century. Walking up the granite steps and through the front door was like walking back in time. In the afternoons the sunlight streamed through the maple trees along the main street and danced through the southwest windows of the great room, over leather reading chairs, the enormous fireplace and vast shelves of books.

When the Westminster chimes of the grandfather clock in the entry room tolled four o’clock it announced tea time. The library’s long time librarians and antiquarians Mabel and Julia would invite me to tea with them in their office. They always served Constant Comment® tea heated by an electric tea pot that stood amidst stacks of books in the corner of the room. Julia would clear the books off a wooden chair and hand me my porcelain tea cup filled with the steaming tea and a ginger snap cookie on the saucer. They inquired about my parent’s health, and were always eager to know how I was doing in school. Mabel would consult with me about what new children’s books she should order for the library and whether I had any ideas about decorations for next month’s bulletin board in the children’s department.

Over cups of Constant Comment® tea I would learn the art of conversation and the etiquette of sipping tea. I remember the very first time I tried the tea I ran home and demanded that my mother buy some Constant “Comet” tea on her next trip to the grocery store. I soon found out that the tea was not a product of an astronomical event but rather an inspiration to conversation, and that it has always truly been for me with old and new friends to this very day. Mabel and Julia have long since left this world and it seems that I am light-years from those Victorian afternoons spent at the library, but if I close my eyes I can still smell the soothing aroma of the Bigelow tea mixed with the intoxicating scent of the old and new books and I recall the love and nurturing of those two dear friends, never forgotten.

By Janice Safoyan

It’s three o’clock on a weekday afternoon. The children are napping. The whistling of the teakettle is my cue to take a deep breath. Contentment fills my soul as the aroma of “Constant Comment®” fills the kitchen. Soon the telephone rings and it is, as I knew it would be, my best friend, Maggie on the line. I hear her deep sigh, almost a purr, as she, too settles in with a cup of the aromatic tea. It is time for our afternoon chat.

We have continued this tradition for years, rarely missing a day. Serendipitously, we would discover years later how good for our health all this tea drinking was. Our friendship blossomed, watered by countless cups of Bigelow’s elixir. Once a week perhaps, our conversations would be held face-to-face as we watched our toddlers form their own bonds, ties that exist to this day. We shared our joys and sorrows, career successes and tragic deaths, our children’s accomplishments, our aging parents’ struggles. Often we would look into our cups, trying to read the future in the amber liquid. A tear might drop, sending out waves of fragrant tea, as comforting and timeless as an ocean tide.

Then Maggie moved to Germany. Communication went from verbal to visual. It was pre-internet days, so we resorted to pen and paper. When the blue aerogram envelope arrived, I would restrain myself from ripping it open long enough to brew a cup of “Constant Comment®.” Some traditions simply have to be honored. We are grandmothers now, our lives full of new babies, second careers and madcap projects. Phone calls are few. E-mail serves, in its impersonal way, as the preferred method of communication. In fact, a recent e-mail from me to my dear friend carried the lament that we no longer have time for a tête-à-tête. All those cups of tea nourished the plant that is our friendship. It is time to feed it again.

By Susan Tornga

I love my Constant Comment® iced tea so much that I drag an insulated sports bottle around with me wherever I go, especially when I plan on having to do something that requires a lot of time. So I fill up the sports bottle with ice, Constant Comment®, sugar and a straw and carry it with me to our stallion barn, to have when holding horses for our farrier, and out to the wash rack when bathing the horses. In fact just about everywhere.

One afternoon, I had the ultimate in time consuming tasks to perform; washing, combing out tangles, and braiding our Thoroughbred stallion, Miraculus Time’s beautiful thick floor length red chestnut tail. After a trip to the wash rack, I tied him up close to his wall mounted grain bin, grabbed the combs, brushes, and conditioner and put my sports bottle in the grain bin. I started in the front with his mane until I had the last of the tangles free, sipping a few times and replacing the bottle in the bin. Miraculus is a brilliant red, very kind stallion, who follows every move you make with his ears forward and his eyes aglow. I finally got around to going behind him to attack the 4 and a half foot long mass of tangles that comprised his tail. After about 20 minutes he stepped forward a few steps and started making some very strong sniffing noises.

A few minutes later he started rattling things around in his grain bucket with his nose. Since stallions are very curious and mouth around on everything, I thought nothing of it and let him go ahead and enjoy himself. It wasn’t long after that, when I heard some very interesting sounds. It sounded like he was chewing on something and there were definitely gurgling noises. I decided to drop everything and go see what he was doing. Imagine my shock when I found my Constant Comment® bottle with his teeth on the straw drinking my tea!! My straw had teeth marks imbedded in it and he had tea dripping from his muzzle. I laughed until my sides hurt. I guessed that I was the only woman on Earth that had ever shared a mug of Constant Comment® with a REAL STUD!! From then on every time I hold him for a new set of shoes, I set the bottle on the ground beside my director’s chair. Every time he points his nose in that direction, I pour out a handful and he slurps it up and licks my hand (clean!). It really has ruined stallion’s reputations to have one licking your hand that way.

ANNE GEINZER, Constant Comment® Contest Runner Up

As you might know, we ran a contest for the best Constant Comment Story.  Our winner is here but below is a runner up that we enjoyed as well!

If I think about this too much it makes me cry, because Constant Comment is the only tea my grandma ever used. I loved her so very much and I think of her every day – she is my inspiration. I grew up in Northbrook, Illinois and my grandparents were hard working people who did so much for their community. They singlehandedly started the Northbrook speed skating club, and my grandma dyed long johns red for the kids uniforms! My most special and loving memory of drinking this tea was after a speed skating race in the dead cold of a Chicago winter. I can still see it in my mind…when my sisters and I were done skating, we would be freezing cold – our toes and noses almost frost bit. We were so little, 6, 7 & 8 years old. We would skate our hearts out for my grandpa, and when we were done we got to race back to my grandma’s car and get warm. We couldn’t wait! My grandma would be waiting in there, snug and warm and tell us how proud she was of us. Then she would get out her red plaid thermos and pour us a cup of “her” tea. It was so sweet and so warm and went through us like a warm, wonderful blanket. Except this was a warm blanket of love from her, like her outstretched arms to keep us from shivering.

She was so amazing to us all, so gifted and so full of love and adventure and we all adored her so much so this special tea, Constant Comment, was her tea and hers alone. I knew the name – I remember recalling it many times and feeling so privileged to have had it. She made us feel so loved and so adored that surely, anything she did, was special. If Mrs. Bigelow hadn’t created that tea, I know my grandma could have. But the fact she loved it, was enough for me to become a fan for life. When I smell it and close my eyes over that cup of warm, orange aroma, it makes me feel like she is right here with me, wrapping her soft arms around me once again. (This is where my tears fall into the cup!)

As for that Northbrook Speed skating Club, my grandpa put that little town on the map when his team won Olympic medals in Sapporo in 1972. I know that her tea went along on that trip and many others! This tea, “her” tea, my grandma’s favorite tea, is now mine and will be always. I hope that someday my two boys will feel the same love that I do when they smell that aroma and that sweetness and know I am with them in every cup. This tea is like a big warm hug of love from someone very special. It is a little cup from heaven.

Heidi Prom

Tea reminds me of my mother. One of my earliest memories is of getting off the big yellow school bus and coming home to find my mother in her bedroom, waiting for me to tell her about my day, sitting in her chair and watching soap operas as she had her “afternoon tea.” She would have her favorite tea cup full of her favorite tea, Constant Comment — a blue and white cup so big it looked more like a soup bowl — and an open-faced sandwich to go along with it. She was European, and afternoon tea was an important ritual to her — so important that I can remember driving home from a family vacation and my mother insisting that she needed to stop for “high tea,” while my father tried to bring her attention to the fact that we were in the north woods of Canada and tea houses were few and far between. We ended up stopping at a truck stop; I don’t think the “high tea” lived up to my mother’s expectations that day.

My favorite family teatime ritual, however, was our evening tea. Every night around 9 p.m. my parents would brew a pot of tea. They would carry out the steaming cups (my mother’s cup taking up far more than its fair share of space on the tray) along with dishes of ice cream or slices of cake. We would sit together, enjoying our dessert and watching television. My mother would sew or flip through a magazine for awhile, but eventually I would lay my head in her lap and she would scratch my head with one hand as she sipped her tea with the other. I would doze off, sleepy and content, feeling her fingers in my hair, her warm touch conveying her love for me. I’m 29 years old, now, and my mother has been gone for three years. She was the glue that held our family together, and I miss those nights of tea and dessert like I miss sunshine in winter. That big blue cup belongs to me, now. When I take it out and make myself a cup of Constant Comment, I can still feel my mother’s hand on my head, and I feel again her love for me, and suddenly all is right with the world again.

—Erika Holst, Runner Up for Best Story for the Constant Comment Contest

Yes, we have a winner for the Constant Comment® Story Contest written by Debora Dickinson.  Thanks Debora for sharing this with us!

As far back as I can remember, my mother bought Bigelow’s Constant Comment Tea, she loved her coffee too, but would relax in the afternoon with her tea in our living room, and when I became a teenager she shared it with me. We would sometimes sit out on our outside front porch in the summer when everything was rich and green and the morning doves were cooing, crickets were noisy and read a good book savoring our CC tea. As I grew up and life became more hectic, time did not always allow for us to sit on the front porch. I never developed a taste for coffee and continued to drink Constant Comment every morning and made iced tea with it, and it became my staple. I moved to other cities to work and live over the years, and had a family, but almost every time I drank Constant Comment tea I would think of my home and my mother and our time together.

So two years ago when she was diagnosed with a terminal disease, I flew home and we cried together and spent our time with each other and we would again sit every day and have our tea, remembering our times 40 years earlier, our summertime’s sipping tea on the front porch. Constant Comment was our very favorite and she would always buy me a box to have for myself when I came to visit for the holidays. Once she even put one in my Christmas stocking! I don’t have a daughter now to share my tea time, but I am acquiring a daughter in law next spring and we will be having an afternoon tea shower for her. I can’t wait for her to taste my Constant Comment. It will seem as if my mother is somewhere there with us in spirit. It was just one of the pleasures in life that we enjoyed in common.

Debora Dickinson with her mother.

I’m so happy that I stumbled on the best tea I’ve tasted in many years. Your array of Bigelow herbal teas has me enjoying  several cupfuls every day. Since I like all of the flavors, I especially enjoy selecting the one to suit my mood for each serving. Until recently when I discovered these delicious teas, I drank coffee which became tiresome and difficult to brew for a fresh, tasty cup. Now the ease in using tea bags is so much quicker. The result is not only a tastier drink but also a healthier one. Thanks for this excellent product.

Helen from Fargo

Two hours across the western Canadian border in a little mom and pop cafe was the first time I drank hot tea for anything besides an upset stomach or menstrual cramps. I was 20 years old, and the owner of the place refused to serve me Pepsi for breakfast. He muttered something about sacrilege and his eggs and (Canadian) bacon served with soda over his dead body. So he brought me a pitcher of hot water and a little basket of Bigelow teas. I picked the Earl Grey because I liked the name, and I had to admit. It DID make breakfast taste better.

After many campfires and hiking trips that same summer I’m convinced that it’s impossible to enjoy nature, or to shake off a cold rainy day as effectively with anything but tea. I’m hooked now. Fewer calories than coffee with the flavored creamers I so love…and I can carry a package in my pocket and find hot water anywhere!

I noticed Earl Grey is the first tea to disappear when I go to conferences or hotels that serve continental breakfasts, so I know I’m not the only one who loves it. Thanks for giving me a chance to share how much I love this tea!

Becky B.
Virginia