Last week sometime, maybe Monday, maybe Tuesday--not important--I was having a delightful time wandering the Street of Shops after over a year's absence. There were many new things to look at and admire and contemplate and pick up and put back down again, among them a pretty white dress that I bought for $12 and a vintage box purse for $6. But the real star of this blog post is a miniature poinsettia tea set that was sitting innocently on a shelf among many other pretty knicknacks. Now, my policy with mini tea sets for many years has been: DO NOT BUY THEM. THEY ARE USELESS. I already have three mini tea sets that I have received as gifts over the years sitting in my room in PA. I see mini tea sets fairly frequently and my instinctive reaction is usually I WANT THAT MINI TEA SET. But I know that they are useless, so I never buy them.
But this poinsettia tea set was VERY hard to pass up. And it was only $8, which is a pretty good price for a beautiful, adorable mini tea set in perfect condition, with poinsettias on it. In the end, though, I stuck to my rule, and I left the Street of Shops without it, but continued thinking about it for days.
This is because I told my mother about it. And I told her about my mini tea set rule, and about how they are useless. And here is my mother's theory about mini tea sets:
"Useless?! No, what you do with mini tea sets is this: when you are having a real tea party, with a real tea set, you take all your mini tea sets and you display them around the room, and then everybody is delighted by how cute they are and you have made your tea party that much better. And you have made everyone so happy and delighted that day with your mini tea sets. No, what you really need are as many mini tea sets as possible."
My mother is a genius, and an enabler. So, of course, after I heard this new theory, I REALLY wanted that poinsettia tea set. Next thing I knew I was back at the Street of Shops a few days later to pick it up when, to my utter shock and bewilderment, I found that it wasn't there anymore! At first I thought I was looking at the wrong shelf or something, but there was no doubt about it. Someone had found it, and bought it, and taken it away!
Now, let me tell you something about the Street of Shops. First of all, this has never happened to me there before. I didn't really think it was possible. As an example, back in, I don't know, the fall of 2009 or something I found a vintage box purse with yellow roses on it that was beautiful, but I wasn't sure if I wanted to buy it, so I passed it up. LAST SUMMER, that is, THE SUMMER OF 2011, a full TWO YEARS LATER, that vintage box purse was STILL THERE. And now, I own that box purse.
That used to be the beauty of the Street of Shops. There's so much junk in that place you had time to mull things over because, chances were, nobody else would ever notice the particular thing you had noticed. And you would probably never notice the things they had noticed. It was magical. Those days are clearly over. I'm not taking any chances in the future. One day, there is a poinsettia tea set in your life. The next, poof! Gone forever.
Well, by this point I had basically developed an unnatural attachment to this object that was never mine in the first place. So I sort of wandered around the Street of Shops aimlessly for an hour even though I had looked through everything on my visit a few days before. I simply could not believe that someone else had noticed my tea set.
BUT THAT IS HOW GODDAMN CUTE IT WAS!
I told my mom what had happened. She was shocked. I looked up "poinsettia mini tea set" on ebay to see if there was its twin somewhere out there. There was one, but I decided that paying $30 for a mini tea set would be establishing a bad precedent for future mini tea set purchases.
I resigned myself to my fate.
And then, the very next day, I went to a thrift store, and saw this:
I could not effing believe it. This mini tea set is IDENTICAL to the poinsettia tea set, except it has magnolias on it. The tea pot is shaped the same, the tea cups are the same size, the sugar bowl and creamer are the same, they both have the same gilt edging. They are obviously from the same exact manufacturer or series or whatever. This tea set, also adorable, also in perfect condition, was unceremoniously thrown into one of those little thrift store bags that they use when an item has too many pieces to keep together, and was hanging on a hook in the dish section. It wasn't displayed in the jewelry case or anything, where it rightfully belonged. I think this is the only reason it hadn't been bought by anyone already. I barely even noticed it at first in that bag, and I had tea sets on the brain. This mini tea set, let it be known, was only $4.
It's moments like these that I feel like the universe is invested in my happiness. Let us all hold onto that feeling, and collect mini tea sets, and bring joy to ourselves, and to others!
