National Candy Cane Day

What the day is

National Candy Cane Day is observed on December 26, the day the things start coming off the tree.

Origin and background

The story everyone repeats is that a choirmaster at Cologne Cathedral in 1670 had sugar sticks bent into shepherds' crooks to keep children quiet during a long service. It is a good story with no contemporary evidence behind it. It cannot be traced earlier than twentieth-century American retellings, and no seventeenth-century source records it.

The religious reading of the candy, with the shape as a shepherd's crook or an inverted letter J, the white for purity and the red for blood, is a similarly modern American addition applied to a sweet that already existed rather than an account of why it was made.

What the record does show is plainer. Straight white sticks of boiled sugar were an ordinary confection for a long time. The hooked shape appears in American sources in the nineteenth century, associated with hanging the sweets on Christmas trees, for which a hook is obviously useful. The red stripes came later still: Christmas cards and illustrations from before about 1900 generally show candy canes as plain white.

The thing that actually made them ubiquitous was manufacturing. Bending hot sugar by hand was slow and broke a great many canes, which kept them a local, seasonal product. In the mid-twentieth century a Georgia candy company, working with a priest in the family who had a talent for machinery, developed equipment that automated the twisting and bending. Mass production followed, and the candy cane became something given away by the handful.

The peppermint is doing something genuinely clever. Menthol activates the receptor the body uses to detect cold, so the candy tastes cold without any change in temperature.

How to take part

• Crush them into ice cream or hot cocoa, which is the best use for the surplus.
• Try a proper hand-pulled cane from a confectioner, which tastes nothing like the mass-market kind.
• Stop repeating the 1670 story, or at least label it as a legend.
• Use one as a stirrer in coffee and let it dissolve.
• Keep them sealed. Sugar pulls in moisture and turns sticky within days.