The caramelo conundrum

The Christmas season in Spain concludes with three kings' day on 6th January - a day in the religious calendar that remembers the coming of the wise men to bring gifts to the baby Jesus. Most Spanish towns celebrate this day with parades through the streets; those passing by on colourful floats throw handfuls of sweets (the Spanish call them caramelos) to the people lining the streets. When we moved into our new house this month, we found that one of the kitchen drawers was filled with literally hundreds of these "caramelos" - mostly wrapped in shiny foil papers. We gave most of them away, but Ada displayed some of them in a decorative glass, high up on a shelf in the kitchen.

Something rather puzzling has been happening over the past two weeks. When we come home in the evening, we often find some of these shiny sweets scattered around the house, or outside on the terrace. Or we find one of the cats playing ball with them, but we can't work out where all these caramelos are coming from. The glass is on a shelf about eight feet off the ground and, even if it were possible for a cat to climb up on the microwave and reach the shelf, surely there's no way it could steal some caramelos without knocking the glass to the floor and smashing it.

This morning, the mystery was finally solved. I heard a rustling sound from the kitchen and guessed that it might be the caramelo culprit in action. Sure enough, when I got to the kitchen, I found Teddi high up on top of the freezer, carefully extracting caramelos from the ornamental glass!! Time to say, "Off, off!!" again, and to hide the glass safely behind cupboard doors.