Pour From a Full Cup — Kristina DeMichele
I fell in love with tea at the age of nine.
I remember my Mom calling me into the living room one night, “Kristini (my childhood nickname), come watch a movie with us.” The long dresses, the dancing, the tension, the long curly-haired man stepping out of a pond with his white button down shirt clinging to his chiseled chest. You guessed it: the movie that night was Pride and Prejudice, starring Colin Firth and Jennifer Ehle. I was captivated by the intimate dialogue, and how sitting down for a cup of tea fostered a lot of these conversations.
The imagery of relationships within Jane Austen’s novels stuck with me throughout my high school and college years. At 23, I moved to Boston for graduate school and finally started dating. About three months into the dating scene, I met a boy who was my definition of ideal at the time: Catholic, a medical resident, polite, funny. He proposed to me when I was 25, and I thought everything in my life was going as planned. Get married at 26 (the same age my parents got married), have children a few years later, work in my dream job in publishing.
But, five months into the engagement, the ridicule began. He first attacked my spirituality for not being enough. Then my interests. Then my body parts. The abuse hollowed me. I was so tied to who I thought I should be that I had forgotten and, really, didn’t know who I actually was. After six weeks, I broke off the engagement—and all contact with him.
As I healed, I gravitated towards the things that made me feel like “Kristini” again.
One of those things was brewing herbal tea in the evenings. The act brought me back to that enamored nine year old watching Pride and Prejudice with my Mom and my sisters.
In 2018, I discovered the Herbstalk conference in Somerville on a whim. All the attendees and herbalist vendors felt like kindred spirits in a way I couldn’t explain. My skincare routine became completely herbal from then on, and I began stocking up on herbal teas from local makers.
Once the pandemic hit in 2020, I witnessed within myself and others the desperate need to protect ourselves from this mysterious virus in any way we could.
A voice inside whispered, “Make your own tea!”
I walked a few blocks down the street to Cambridge Naturals and bought little bags of herbs from their bulk herb wall. While working from home, I researched which herbs had antiviral properties and studied the herbal tea boxes I had that said things like “throat coat” and “tension tamer.” I developed blends with herbs that could relieve anxiety and insomnia; fever and cough; headache and heartache. I tested these blends for myself, and then I asked friends if they’d like to try. I distinctly remember one of my friends calling me and blurting out, “You NEED to sell these teas.”
So I called up my designer friend Scott Murry to see if he could create my logo. The name of my company—Kristini’s Teas—pays homage to my childhood nickname and the representation of my fearless inner child who saw from a young age how tea can bring people together.
Drinking tea can be a holistic experience, healing the physical, emotional, and spiritual aspects of ourselves.
My hope is that these blends will act as tools to help others along their healing journeys and along their paths towards emotional and spiritual fulfillment.
