The story of the candy cane
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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