The Three Wizard Kings are in town! (Epiphany)

Finally! They are here! They don´t just sneak down through the chimney when nobody sees them like their red-coated fellow present bringer. After getting the Key of Seville from the Heraldo they come with a procession for everybody to see that they have arrived!

We arrived to the streets about half an hour early and by then they were lined with people. Everybody was trying to push their kids to the front row where they were dutifully waiting with their plastic bags at the ready.

Finally the procession arrived! There were bands to provide music and rhythm and floats in a variety of themes. The King´s floats were stuck in between these with Balthasar´s being the last. Here's a selection.

I have a feeling that the biggest attraction of this event is not the horses, the bands or the floats, not even the Kings themselves. It´s the SWEETS! They were falling from the sky! Every single person on the floats was holding a huge bag of sweets and threw them left and right.

Do not fear though, the children were ready for them. They were holding up their bags as high as they could, shouting for the children on the floats to catch their attention.

As soon as a handful of sweeties were thrown people all around got down to the floor to pick them up as fast as they could. Even the parents and the elderly, too! Have a look at this video to see it all.

The whole street went crazy. It was an all-out war for the sweets. Parents made sure that they were wearing a coat with a hood on so it catches some, too. Buggies seemed a great sweet-catcher. We even saw an ingenuous idea of holding an upturned umbrella!

The floats were coming and the sweets were falling and falling. Even people on the side of the street got an involuntary amount as it fell in people’s hoods and hats. It was actually a good thing to wear a hat as when a little wrapped yumminess hits you on the head you’ll feel it! Even better to wear sunglasses to cover your eyes, too.

Even I couldn’t escape the atmosphere. Even though I only picked a few sweets my bag was still heavy with them. It will be a great incentive for my students and will probably last a few months, too.

After the floats were gone the street was covered in colourful wrapping papers, almost half of them still full.

And if it still wasn't enough, you could go and cut through the streets to get ahead of the slow-going procession, get ahead of it and start collecting sweets again and again.