National Candy Cane Day

The story

The candy cane is a hard peppermint stick shaped like a shepherd's crook and striped red and white. According to a popular legend, a choirmaster at Cologne Cathedral in Germany handed out bent sugar sticks around 1670 to keep children quiet during long Christmas services, though there is little evidence for the story. What is documented is that plain white sugar canes were used to decorate Christmas trees in 19th-century Europe and America.

The red stripes and peppermint flavor were added in the early 1900s. For decades, canes were pulled, twisted, and bent by hand, which made them expensive. In the 1950s, Father Gregory Harding Keller, a Catholic priest whose brother-in-law Bob McCormack ran a candy company in Albany, Georgia, invented a machine that automated the bending, turning the candy cane into an affordable holiday staple.

Today Americans buy well over a billion candy canes each year, most of them between Thanksgiving and Christmas. Beyond classic peppermint, they come in fruit, cinnamon, and novelty flavors, and they are crushed into bark, cookies, and hot chocolate.

On National Candy Cane Day, hang a few on the tree, stir one into a mug of cocoa, or bake them into a festive treat.