Every year I do some baking with the youngest students at my school. I like the tradition of baking cookies for Christmas time and I enjoy sharing that tradition with my students. The students also look forward to this event, as it’s fun and they get to take home cookies.

One of the cookies I bake with students are ice-box cookies that I’ve prepared in advance. Sometimes I throw dried fruits or nuts into the cookie dough. This year I thought I’d add dried cranberries because they taste great and they add a festive colour to the cookies.

Seeing as it’s Sunday and I had some free time, I decided to prepare the cookie dough today. But first, I needed to get some of those dried cranberries. I’ve been buying the dried cranberries off and on all year at various 100 yen stores (the equivalent of a dollar store) in and around Naruto. Therefore I thought it would be quick and easy to pick up the cranberries. No way!

I spent 90 minutes driving from store to store looking for the dried cranberries only to find them gone from the store. Not only that, but merchandise has been moved around in many places so that you get the impression that they never sold the dried cranberries in the first place.

In the end, I gave up and purchased some freeze-dried strawberries thinking that their colour would be similar to that of the cranberries. Unfortunately, the strawberries were not a pretty colour even though they smelled and tasted great. I dumped them in anyway.

I was almost finished with the cookie dough when I thought I should give one last check in our pantry in case there happened to be some remaining packages of dried cranberries. And do you know what? There, at the back of the pantry was one remaining bag of dried cranberries. Success! Satisfaction!

Now the cookie dough is freezing and tomorrow it will be cut into cookies, in preparation for use with my students. I’m glad all worked out with the cookies. But I still wonder what happened to all of the dried cranberries in Naruto?