Tea Gift Ideas for the Holidays: Customer Favorites and Seasonal Stars
Here we are two weeks into the holiday season, and just like that—snap!—we’re reveling in colored lights and red bows, pine aromatics and gingerbread. The annual thrill. It’s always so bright and atmospheric while it lasts—weeks of intense festive fun until the curtain falls on January 1 and we pledge to exercise more, drink less, work harder and align with strict diets.
Let’s live it up for this final patch of 2025, and never say “no” to another Christmas cookie. When a host offers a cup of eggnog, do we hesitate? We do not. Exercise? Maybe it leans more “strolling down Main Street happily hunting for gifts” rather than “enduring an hour on the Stairmaster.”
Savoring the season’s joyful excess
The celebration of letting loose creeps into all corners of our lives—including tea routines. If we tend to drink the same gorgeous green every morning, during the season we might switch that for something completely different—a blend bright with seasonal flavors.
The season, too, buzzes with gift-shopping. We devote hours to searching for those just-right presents for Aunt Mei, cousin Giaccomo, our favorite colleagues and our children. The shopping often thrills. But the best bit hits when the loved one opens the box or bag and oohs over the thoughtful gift. That’s gold, right there.
Let us help you mine those gold moments, with ideas for tea gifts. In addition to our seasonal holiday blends, which we have been promoting extensively, consider some of our most popular teas. These are playful, delicious and festive—perfect presents!
Popular Gift Teas: Milk Oolong
As tea merchants, we often have a sense about whether a tea will become popular—but it’s still always a guessing game. The first time we sipped our Milk Oolong we said, “This one might have legs.” The taste and texture captivated us. We introduced it to the lineup, people who ordered it kept on ordering more, word spread. And now Milk Oolong stands as one of our best-selling teas. Give it a shot—we predict it’ll become a favorite for you, too—or whoever receives it as a gift. The oolong tea that anchors this blend is important for its popularity—but it’s the non-dairy creamer that gets roasted with the leaves during the processing phase that makes it so unique.
Popular Gift Teas: Monkey Bread Puerh Blend
Is there a single sweet lover who doesn’t swoon over monkey bread? We don’t think so. A gift to Americans from Hungarian immigrants in the middle of the 20th century, the cinnamon-punched pastry rarely lasts long in bakeries. The scent alone draws people from sidewalks and parking lots through shop front doors.
As monkey bread enthusiasts, we decided to craft our own version—in liquid form. As with milk oolong, we suspected customers would embrace it. But it wasn’t until sales ballooned that we could back up our support with data—it’s a rock star of a blend.
This beauty contains three (!) iterations of Camellia sinensis—green pu-erh, oolong and black. To that extremely stout base we add add two baking heroes: cinnamon and allspice. The combination captures the heady, perfumed essence of monkey bread. What a gift—for you or a loved one!
Popular Gift Teas: Dark Chocolate Puerh
The December holidays don’t revolve around chocolate, like Valentine’s Day. But the indulgence plays a vital role in mid- to late-December. It stars in cookies. It melds with peppermint for singular seasonal delicacies. People dissolve it in hot water, add marshmallows, sip.
Here’s our tea-forward take on hot chocolate. This special blend begins with pu-erh and black tea, a combo platter that offers robust depth and earthy complexity. Then comes the cacao nibs, which infuse the tea with strong cocoa notes. Sweet rice herb, common in China, adds yummy sticky rice notes to the elixir. The final touch? Vanilla! The tropical botanical adds that push that tips the drink into seasonal hot cocoa territory. Surpise a loved one with this treasure.
Popular Gift Ideas: Hot Cinnamon
Cinnamon covers a lot of ground during Christmas, as well as other holidays, from Thanksgiving to Valentine’s Day. And holiday or not, it ranks as a favorite American spice—we love it. So for this blend we sourced three varieties of cinnamon to offer customers the full cinnamon experience. To round out the taste sensation, we added another baking spice: cloves. Finally, the blend gets touched with orange, a citrus that always pairs well with baking spices. Happy holidays with this one!
Popular Gift Ideas: Toasted Almond
An entire category of Christmas sweets hinge on marzipan, the European-rooted blend of sugar and almond meal. Marzipan figures into cookies and bars, cakes and animal-shaped confections. Almond slivers decorate a diversity of cookies, and other cookies incorporate the nuts into their recipes. If Thanksgiving is all about pecans—for that iconic pie—then Christmas and the December festivities dwell in the land of almond.
To trumpet the many advantages of this outstanding nut, we created our popular Toasted Almond blend. Just almonds? Of course not. To make this one especially magnetic, we added apple, cinnamon and beetroot pieces to the blend. The apples offer familar sweet notes—and one of almond’s hallmark foils. And the beetroot brings pink color to the brew. It’s an absolute delight, and sure to thrill any gift recipient!
Popular Gift Ideas: Blue Butterfly Green
This registers as one of our most unique teas—by far. And given its … magical … properties, it’s a splendid gift. Chances are your gift recipient, even if she loves tea, has never had tea like this before!
The key is blue butterfly pea flowers. These mysterious botanicals turn purple when they get hit by an acid, like lemon juice. That’s the magic—brew a pot of this delish tea, pour it into in a clear cup, dot it with lemon juice and voila—magic!
But this tea is about much more than visual tricks. The base? Excellent green tea. The other amendments? Jasmine, strawberry and papaya. Fruity, floral, grassy from green tea—this one’s got it all. Plus the magic. What a gift!
Popular Gift Ideas: Pink Peony White
Looking for fun? Look no further. This blend’s got color, from dragon fruit, pomegranate and hibiscus. Think holiday red. Then it’s got fruit—pineapple, apple, plus the aforementioned dragon fruit and pomegranate. Green tea anchors it in Camellia sinensis (always a spot-on idea). And yogurt crunch adds welcome creaminess to this dream.
It’s the whole deal, and an ideal gift for anybody looking for a tea that satisfies on so many levels.
Popular Gift Ideas: Japanese Chiyogami Tea Canisters
Tea lovers rejoice—but this applies to design fanatics, too. Check out our tea canisters swaddled in hand-decorated chiyogami paper. Artisans in Japan craft this beautiful paper, which gets used for a diversity of decorative pursuits. We scored tea canisters wrapped in this paper, and are eager for you to pick up a few, fill them with tea and rest them on your counter—these are not meant for drawers. Too pretty!
Each canister holds up to 6 ounces of loose-leaf tea, and includes a second lid to ensure freshness. When ordering, please to indicate your color preference.
We champion these canisters as superb gifts for any occasion—including the holidays!
