45 Fun Facts About Candy Canes

Which two colors make up the classic candy cane?

White and red: the red goes on as straight strips laid along a fat white log of candy, and only when the rope is stretched and twisted do they wind into the familiar barber-pole spiral.

The best-known candy cane origin story places its 1670 invention in which German cathedral city?

Cologne Cathedral is the legend's setting, where a choirmaster is said to have ordered the first crooks; the hook may equally have been added so the sticks could hang on Christmas trees, and no record settles it.

In the 1670 legend, why did a German cathedral choirmaster hand out sugar sticks to children?

To keep them quiet through a long nativity service, the story goes; to head off objections to candy in church, he had each stick bent into a crook recalling the shepherds.

August Imgard, credited with first hanging candy canes on an American Christmas tree in 1847, was an immigrant from where?

Germany was his birthplace; in Wooster, Ohio, he cut a spruce from the woods for Christmas 1847, and the town took to lighting a Christmas tree over his grave each year.

The earliest known printed mention of a 'candy cane', from 1866, appeared in a magazine in which country?

United States: Boston's Ballou's Monthly Magazine used the words in the story 'Tom Luther's Stockings', nearly two centuries after the 1670 date the German legend claims for the first cane.

An 1844 recipe for peppermint sticks in The Complete Confectioner already calls for which candy cane hallmark?

Colored stripes were there early: the recipe wants the peppermint 'kept perfectly white, except the stripes'. The sticks were straight, though, and nobody is known to have written 'candy cane' until 1866.

Which Detroit duo released the Christmas single 'Candy Cane Children' in 2002?

The White Stripes took their whole look from peppermint candy: Jack White said the band's red, white and black colors came from it, and their die-hard fans go by the name Candy Cane Children.

Christmas cards printed before 1900 show candy canes looking how?

Plain white canes are all that cards from before 1900 show, even though striped peppermint sticks had been sold for decades; red-striped canes turn up on cards only in the early 1900s.

In which Georgia city did Bob McCormack start the candy company behind Bobs candy canes in 1919?

Albany is also where peanuts later kept the firm going: with sugar rationed and pecans too dear in wartime, McCormack fell back on peanut-butter crackers and vacuum-packed peanuts.

Gregory Harding Keller, who invented the Keller Machine used by Bobs Candies, had what day job?

Roman Catholic priest Gregory Keller was Bob McCormack's brother-in-law; his 1950s machine turned a slow handmade treat into one Bobs Candies could mass-produce and sell nationwide.

What did the machine in Gregory Keller's 1957 patent filing do?

Bend cut candy sticks into canes: the patent promises a rolling action that curls each crook with 'little or no breakage', and the automatic hook helped Bobs take a hand-bent treat nationwide.

Bobs Candies claimed to be the earliest manufacturer to do what?

Wrap its candy in cellophane: the clear film of the early 1920s kept out water but let damp air pass straight through, and it was only in 1927 that DuPont made cellophane truly moisture-proof.

In the 1950s, what innovation let Bobs Candies start shipping its candy canes nationwide?

Break-proof packaging got the brittle canes to faraway stores in one piece, and by the end of the 1950s the once-local Georgia firm was turning out 1.8 million sticks of candy a day.

As of 2025, which Chicago company, maker of Lemonheads, owns the Bobs candy cane brand?

Ferrara sells Bobs beside Lemonheads and Red Hots, and the all-American cane brand now answers to Italy: Ferrero, the maker of Nutella and Tic Tac, bought Ferrara in 2017.

Which Ohio company, famous for Dum-Dums lollipops, got into candy canes in 1954 by buying a Detroit cane maker?

Spangler invented neither of its signature candies: it bought Dum-Dums from the Akron Candy Company in 1953, then picked up Detroit's A-Z Christmas candy cane business a year later.

Around 2001, both Bobs Candies and the maker of Dum-Dums began shifting candy cane production to which country?

Mexico: the Dum-Dums maker struck a deal with a confectioner in Ciudad Juárez to turn out its everyday canes, and Georgia's Bobs began moving its own cane lines south that same year.

By the National Confectioners Association's count, roughly how many candy canes are made in the United States each year?

1.76 billion works out to about five candy canes for every American, and a single Ohio factory says it turns out more than two million of them a day.

Cooked candy cane sugar starts out clear and golden, so what turns it bright white?

Pulling air into it: stretched and folded over and over, the golden batch fills with tiny air bubbles and turns an opaque, silky white before the red stripes are laid on.

When is National Candy Cane Day observed in the United States?

The day after Christmas, December 26, is an odd pick: by the candy trade's own figures, cane sales peak in the second week of December, a good two weeks before the day that honors them.

Why does mint feel chilly in your mouth?

Menthol triggers the body's cold receptor, a nerve sensor called TRPM8, so the brain reads 'cold' though nothing has cooled; the capsaicin in chili peppers plays the same trick on a heat sensor.

The mint plant behind the candy cane's flavor is a natural hybrid of which two other mints?

Watermint and spearmint crossed naturally to make peppermint, and the hybrid rarely sets seed; it spreads by creeping underground stems instead, so aggressively that gardeners are told to keep it in a pot.

Candy cane syrup must be cooked to which stage on a candy thermometer?

Hard crack is the hottest stage candy recipes call for, and cooks can test for it without a thermometer: a drop of syrup in cold water snaps into brittle threads instead of bending.

What do British English speakers call hard candy such as candy canes?

Boiled sweets is an understatement: the syrup is cooked to roughly 150 to 160 C, far hotter than boiling water, until almost none of the water it started with is left.

What is Sweden's red-and-white mint stick, first sold in Gränna in 1859?

Polkagris, literally 'polka pig', began with a legal exception: Swedish law then barred most women from running a business, so Amalia Eriksson, newly widowed with a baby, had to win a special licence from the town.

Which 1951 Perry Como song mentions candy canes in its first verse?

It's Beginning to Look a Lot Like Christmas got a second act: its writer, Meredith Willson of The Music Man, reused it in Here's Love, his 1963 Broadway musical version of Miracle on 34th Street.

What happened to Alain Roby's record 51-foot candy cane in 2012?

Shared out in pieces: the cane had been laid out from the courthouse toward his chocolate shop in Geneva, Illinois, and once the measurement was official, helpers handed out the pieces as souvenirs.

Besides shepherds' crooks, the candy cane's hook is often said to represent the crosier of which bishop?

Nicholas of Myra is the 4th-century bishop behind Santa Claus, and on his feast day, December 6, candy canes are handed to children as miniature copies of his staff.

The claim that the candy cane's 'J' shape stands for Jesus is described by historians as what?

An urban legend is candy historian Susan Benjamin's verdict, and the tale gives itself away: it knows its Indiana candymaker's home state and his exact motives, yet nobody has ever been able to supply his name.

Which holiday confection combines crushed candy canes with layers of white and dark chocolate?

Peppermint bark was popularized by Williams-Sonoma's layered version, launched in 1998. The retailer says its recipe went through more than 20 rounds of testing before it went on sale.

What is the flat round peppermint disc with red stripes radiating from the center called?

Starlight mints are the candy cane's flat cousin, and holiday bakers use them the same way: cookbooks scatter crushed starlights over truffles and chocolate desserts, and some recipes accept crushed canes or starlights alike.

Which British seaside candy has a word running through the whole stick?

Rock gets its lettering at giant scale: each letter is built from strips of colored and white sugar, the letters are packed into a bar too fat to get your hands around, and the bar is stretched until the word is stick-sized.

Which 2003 Christmas film counts candy canes among the four main food groups?

Elf has Buddy list candy, candy canes, candy corns and syrup as the four food groups. His walk to New York also crosses the seven levels of the Candy Cane forest before it reaches the Lincoln Tunnel.

In Balanchine's Nutcracker, dancers dressed as candy canes perform with hoops to which of Tchaikovsky's national dances?

Russian: the trepak is the Candy Cane dance, a hoop number Balanchine knew firsthand. He had once danced it himself at the Maryinsky in St. Petersburg, decades before his 1954 New York staging.

Which root vegetable has an Italian heirloom variety nicknamed the candy cane for its red-and-white rings?

Beet: slice a Chioggia, named for a town near Venice, and it shows red-and-white rings. Cooks prize it because it barely bleeds, so it will not stain a whole salad pink the way a red beet does.

Which Valentine's candy skipped 2019 after its maker went bankrupt and an Ohio candy cane firm bought the brand?

Sweethearts, the conversation hearts stamped Be Mine, went unmade for Valentine's Day 2019 while their new owner rebuilt production. The deal gave a firm known for Christmas canes and Halloween lollipops a third holiday.

The word 'candy' reached English through French, Arabic and Persian, probably from which Sanskrit word for a piece of sugar?

Khanda meant a piece or fragment, as in a lump of sugar, and probably became candy by way of Persian and Arabic. The wrong answer sharkara made the same trip and landed as a different English word: sugar.

In Greek myth, the nymph Minthe, who was turned into the mint plant, was the lover of which god?

Hades took the underworld nymph Minthe as his lover, and it ended badly for her: in the surviving tellings his wife Persephone, or her mother Demeter, tramples her or transforms her into the mint plant.

Which comedian stars in the 2023 Christmas film Candy Cane Lane?

Eddie Murphy plays a laid-off dad so set on winning his street's decorating contest that he strikes a shady deal at a magical Christmas shop, and the cast of The Twelve Days of Christmas steps off his lawn tree into real life.

Which Chicago confectioners held a patent, granted in 1931, on a machine for forming candy canes?

The Bunte Brothers were assigned the 1931 patent of inventor Brasher Westerfield, whose machine cut a strip of candy and shaped the canes automatically. Handwork outlasted it: a leading maker still finished canes by hand in the 1950s.

In 1940, what destroyed the Georgia factory of candy cane maker Bobs, which had no insurance against it?

A tornado swept the town's business district and left the plant as rubble, and the firm carried no tornado insurance. Bob McCormack rebuilt with the company's own money and had it making candy again within about six months.

Which glassmaking technique, like candy cane making, stretches a fat patterned rod thin so the design survives in miniature?

Millefiori, Italian for thousand flowers, fuses a bundle of colored glass rods, draws it out thin and slices it into disks that each show the pattern. A candy cane's stripes ride through the stretch in just the same way.

Why does an unwrapped candy cane turn sticky when left out?

Sugar absorbs water from the air, and a candy cane is mostly sugar, so a damp day leaves its surface tacky. It is why candy cookbooks tell cooks to wait for a fair, dry day before they start a batch.

The 'cane' in candy cane descends from the Greek kanna, meaning what?

Reed is what Greek kanna and Latin canna meant, a word probably borrowed from a Semitic language. The same hollow stalk gave English cannon, by way of the Italian for a big tube, and probably canal too.

In which country was peppermint first recorded as a distinct plant, in the 1690s?

England: naturalist John Ray published it in 1696 from a plant found in Hertfordshire. Growers at Mitcham in Surrey then made it a crop, which is why the black peppermint farmed across the United States is still called Mitcham mint.

The Ohio candy cane maker behind Dum-Dums lollipops started out in 1906 making what?

Baking powder, with baking soda, starch and spices, was the whole line when the firm opened in 1906, by its own account. Candy came only after the founder's brother suggested it, and by 1920 the company made nothing else.