Sweet moments

Every Christmas, I would 'help' my grandma (Mama) make sweets. She made some (milk cream, neuris (karanji), kulkuls, dal sweet, once she made nankhatai) and we bought some (marzipan, baskets and rose cookies) every year till she died, after which we only bought sweets.
We usually began operations two weeks before Christmas, with me helping to stir the dal sweet (and clean the pan and spoon later by scraping and licking it clean) and assembling the individual neuris by filling the dough circles with coconut and raisins.
While doing this last job, I would announce: "I'll make one (neuri), and eat one (raisin - which I loved), only to have my grandma swoop down on me and warn me sternly against it.
Another job I really liked was rolling kulkuls on a comb or the red mould we acquired later. This was the safest thing to give me to do, my grandma realised, as I would never deign to eat them till they had been swirled in the sugar syrup - the last stage of the operation - before they were done.
The other poignant memory I have of this time is of watching my grandma like a hawk after she came back with our order of sweets, to see where she was hiding them. Poor thing, the house only had so many hidey holes, so my sister and I would discover them sooner or later, and then gleefully wolf down some sweeties, which tasted even better as an illict pleasure than on Christmas morning, when we were lawfully allowed to have them.