How do I close all tabs in safari

Question

After using safari for a short while I many times have a lot of tabs at the top of my safari screen. These stay up there even after I quit safari and come back later. I know this looks like a good thing if I wanted to go back to a page I looked at earlier but I usually just manually close each page one by one until they are all gone. Between favorites, bookmarks, home page icons that I create etc. I can pretty much get to most things I want to get to very easily. Of course I also use history to do this as well.
My question is this: is there a way to clear all of the open tabs at the top of a safari screen with only one or at most two taps?
TIA
Pete

Answer 1

I appreciate the answer but that does not address my specific issue.  Your way does work. I'm looking for a non "invasive" way to accomplish a simple task.  Your description of what to do is perfectly acceptable to me as a way to fix something that is broken or confused in an application. But clearing cookies a few times a day and going through settings over and over for what I consider a simple operational housekeeping task is overkill. That does bother me. It seems intuitive to me that accomplishing something as simple as closing all of the tabs is something I should be able to do "right here" while I'm in the app. I like to keep things tidy on any computing device I use. I'm kind of old school that way.  This is not a major problem. It's just one that irks me because I make minimal use of tabs and I wish I had more control over their behavior.
In poking through the boards I see that this is the only way to accomplish this task. That's pretty silly IMHO.