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Christmas Craft Story · 3 min read

The story of the candy cane

A vintage glass ornament beside an antique storybook

Plain white sugar sticks have been a Christmas treat since at least the 1600s, when a choirmaster in Cologne is said to have bent them into a hook shape to keep children quiet during the nativity service — the curve doubling as a shepherd's crook.

The red stripes came much later, sometime around 1900, alongside peppermint flavoring. By the mid-20th century, a machine built to auto-twist the stripes made the candy cane cheap and easy to produce at holiday scale.

These days it's as likely to hang on the tree as end up in a mug of cocoa — either way, still the same simple sugar stick from four hundred years ago.

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