Candy Cane. Evan Amos / wikimedia / 2011 / public domain
The 26th of December has been dubbed “Candy Cane Day”, though no one seems to know quite by whom.
Perhaps it was some mother, starting to panic over how many candy canes from this year would be joining those already left over from last year — and deciding the day after Christmas to launch an immediate campaign to shift them.
Candy canes have a lot of hokum attached to them. At the risk of sounding like a Grinch, consider the following to be pure myths:
- Candy canes were invented in 1670 to give to children at church so they’d behave better at the Christmas concert. Some people elaborate and say that it was a creche ceremony at Cologne Cathedral, and that it was the choir director who gave them out to his young choristers. His idea was that the candy would look like shepherd’s crooks (these were all white at the time, the story goes);
- The peppermint flavour represents hyssop, a herb mentioned in the Bible.
