Tea Books for Children

Also author of The Everything Healthy Tea Book, Babette, who’s certified by the Specialty Tea Institute of the Tea Council of the USA, credits her love of tea to her graduate degree in ceramic arts at San Francisco State University during the 1970s and the city itself. “Every semester, I had to do a project. One was to make a functional teapot, fit it into history and a style, and demonstrate pouring from it. Studying the history and elegance of ancient teaware inspired curiosity for the beverage and the worldwide cultures that celebrate it ceremoniously.” The city, which has a large Asian population, was her laboratory. “In San Francisco, many different cultural tea experiences were available. I went to Japantown, Chinatown, and the Asian Art Museum. I observed and spent hours hearing stories about visiting tea plantations, how tea grew and was processed by hand, and about beautiful legends,” says Babette, who now lives in Grass Valley, California, a small Gold Country town. “Tea offers us a wide culture and language.”

Her third book, Emma Lea’s First Tea Ceremony, reflects that. Emma Lea’s friend Sam, who is Japanese-American, invites her to a Japanese tea ceremony in his family’s teahouse in their patio, lending her a kimono to wear. Her inspiration for her series is “the basic belief that tea offers something meaningful for families— so they start to see tea as a major part of life, not just a beverage.” Fittingly, she launched a project, Sip for Peace, where a group ponders famous people’s quotes about peace, from John Lennon and Eleanor Roosevelt to Martin Luther King, Jr., as they sip tea, visualize a world without war or violence, and share their personal peace with others. (It won a World Tea Expo award for best consumer marketing campaign in 2019.) Signup for Sunday Sip-Ins for peace on Zoom is on her tea education website, tching.com, which also offers 3,500 articles about tea, events listings, a newsletter, and monthly raffle prizes.