Eat Your Tea

In North America, Tea is simply an aromatic beverage commonly prepared by pouring hot or boiling water over cured leaves of the tea plant, or tea bags.

In the United Kingdom however, Tea has a few different meanings depending on who you talk to, and the context:
1) the beverage by itself, just like North America
2) a late afternoon light meal at four o'clock, irrespective of the beverage consumed
3) essentially an informal meal after lunch, but before a proper supper. Supper being more formal and Tea being more informal.

We were at our pastor's house hanging out, when the pastor's wife said- "would you all like tea?"
Raeleen is a tea drinker, but I don't prefer the stuff, and since we don't usually think of giving tea to our kids, we just told her that Raeleen would like tea and the rest of us were good.

She then asked what Raeleen would like to drink for Tea. She said that they had orange juice, lemonade, Coke, water, coffee or tea....
Needless to say we were quite confused. Once the rest of us realized that there were more options, we all chimed in our requests.
We then sat down for a full meal, which was as we discovered, the Tea.

Once we expressed our confusion, the pastor's wife began to explain to us what "Having Tea" means here and things finally started to make sense.

We finished Tea and adjourned to the living room to continue our conversation.
We had maybe been talking for 15 minutes or so before she then asked us if we would like some "pudding".
We all thought that that sounded good, so we unanimously replied "yes".

She then came out with bowls of meringue, sitting in cream, with strawberries on top.
Raeleen and I again looked at each other confused.
This time we were sure that we must have missed the translation again, so we inquired.

She (the pastor's wife) began to explain that "Pudding" here in the United Kingdom is simply their word for "Dessert".
Pudding isn't merely a dessert with a creamy consistency, like Jello Pudding Snacks, but could mean anything, sweet or savory, that you would have following your meal.

Toto, I have a feeling we're not in Kansas anymore...