50 Fun Facts About Candy Canes

What colors are the stripes on a classic candy cane?

Modern canes come in every flavor and color, but the peppermint original was plain white for most of the 1800s.

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

The tale is almost certainly invented after the fact: no version of it appears in print before the mid-20th century.

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

He supposedly asked the candy maker to add a crook so the sticks would recall the shepherds' staffs.

In which Ohio town did August Imgard decorate the first documented US Christmas tree in 1847?

Wooster still celebrates him; the tree was a blue spruce cut from woods outside town.

The earliest known printed use of 'candy cane' appears in an 1866 story published by whom?

The story was 'Tom Luther's Stockings'; the first explicit link to Christmas came eight years later in The Nursery.

An 1844 recipe book, The Complete Confectioner, described mint candy sticks as what?

The crook is the late arrival: canes were straight sticks for decades before anyone bent them.

Which magazine, in 1882, described 'tall, twisted candy canes' being hung on a Christmas tree?

By then the tree-ornament use was common enough to appear in a magazine for toddlers.

Per the National Confectioners Association, red stripes and mint flavor became the norm around when?

Postcards from before 1900 show all-white canes; the stripes seem to arrive with the new century.

Bob McCormack began making candy canes for local children in 1919 in which Georgia city?

His company started life as the Famous Candy Company and became Bobs' Candy Company in 1924.

Gregory Harding Keller, inventor of the machine that automated candy cane bending, had what day job?

He was Bob McCormack's brother-in-law and had been a seminary student in Rome when the idea took shape.

What did the Keller Machine actually do?

The patent for a 'candy cane forming machine' was issued in October 1960; in modern production the sticks are wrapped before they are bent.

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

Before automation the crook was bent by hand and roughly a fifth of canes broke, which is why the wrapper mattered.

By the end of the 1950s, how many sticks of candy was Bobs Candies turning out each day?

National sales had reached $3.3 million; by 2001 the Georgia plant made about 500 million canes a year.

Bobs Candies, once the world's largest striped-candy maker, was sold in 2005 to which company?

The buyer closed the Albany plant that year and later merged into Ferrara, which still sells canes under the Bobs name.

Which Bryan, Ohio company, known for Dum-Dums, makes roughly 45 percent of US candy canes?

The town paints giant Dum-Dums on its water tower and calls itself the Dum-Dums Capital of the World.

How many candy canes does the Bryan, Ohio maker of Dum-Dums say it crafts every day?

It describes itself as the only major candy cane producer left in the United States.

Roughly how many candy canes are produced in the United States each year?

About nine in ten are sold in the four weeks between Thanksgiving and Christmas.

What share of US candy canes are sold between Thanksgiving and Christmas?

Peak sales fall in the second week of December, when trees are going up.

In the last month of the year, canes hold what sales distinction in the US?

Chocolate still wins the month overall, but nothing else in the sugar aisle comes close.

A survey cited by History.com found what share of people start eating a candy cane from the straight end?

The remaining 28 percent go crook-first, which is harder to do politely.

National Candy Cane Day is observed in the US on which day?

The day after Christmas is when the canes come off the tree and get eaten.

Why does mint feel chilly in your mouth?

The receptor is called TRPM8; the brain gets a 'cold' signal even though nothing has actually cooled down.

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

Linnaeus named it Mentha piperita in 1753 from plants found in Hertfordshire, England.

Menthol, the compound that gives mint its cool bite, was first isolated in what year?

German scientist Hieronymus David Gaubius did it; India now leads the world in producing natural menthol.

Candy canes are a hard candy, made by heating sugar syrup to roughly what temperature?

The result is nearly 100 percent sugar by weight, locked in a glassy non-crystalline state.

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

It is a misnomer: the syrup is cooked to the hard-crack stage, not merely boiled.

Why is the body of a cane white when the sugar syrup it starts from is golden brown?

The same pulling step is used for British seaside rock, which then has letters running through it.

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

Widow Amalia Eriksson invented it to support her family; the name means 'polka pig' and only Gränna-made sticks can carry it under EU rules.

Guinness recognized the world's largest candy cane, made in Lansing, Michigan in 1998. How long was it?

Employees of Fabiano's Chocolates and Ice Cream used 25 pounds of sugar and 8 pounds of corn syrup for a cane four inches thick.

Which Geneva, Illinois pastry chef holds the Guinness record for the world's longest candy cane?

His 2012 cane ran 51 feet; he spent 24 years as executive pastry chef at the Hyatt Regency Chicago before opening All Chocolate Kitchen.

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

The bishop of Myra's crosier and December 6 feast day are the roots of Santa Claus; the 'J for Jesus' story is a modern urban legend.

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

White peppermint sticks existed in Europe long before the story, which surfaced only in the 20th century.

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

Williams-Sonoma made it famous in 1998, but a newspaper reference from 1966 shows Americans were already making it.

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

They sit in the same 'hard mint' family as humbugs and Altoids, and are the free-at-the-register candy of countless diners.

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

The letters are built from strips of colored candy around a pulled white core, then the whole assembly is stretched thin.

Which 2003 film has Will Ferrell's Buddy list candy canes among the elves' four main food groups?

Buddy's other groups are candy, candy corn and syrup; he pours the last one on spaghetti.

In Balanchine's 1954 Nutcracker, the Russian trepak is danced by characters dressed as what?

Spanish dancers represent chocolate, Arabian coffee and Chinese tea in the same act.

A 1570 guild chronicle from which German city describes a small tree hung with apples, nuts and pretzels for Christmas?

Edible ornaments came first; glass baubles were not made until 1847 in Lauscha, the same year Imgard hung candy canes in Ohio.

Glass Christmas baubles were first made in 1847 in which German town?

Before glass, trees carried apples, gingerbread and white candy sticks that children were allowed to eat.

The word 'candy' ultimately comes from a Sanskrit word for sugar crystals. What is it?

Medieval European confectioners learned sugar-work from Arab and Byzantine sources and first used it for medicines.

How many bomb hits did the cathedral at the center of the candy cane legend survive during World War II?

It stayed standing while the city around it was flattened; it had taken 632 years to finish, from 1248 to 1880.

Traditionally, what did misbehaving children risk finding in their Christmas stocking?

The stocking custom itself grows out of the tale of Saint Nicholas tossing gold through a poor family's window, where it landed in a stocking hung to dry.

Which Chicago confectioners filed one of the earliest patents for a candy cane-making machine in the early 1920s?

Even so, canes still had to be bent by hand as they came off the line, and breakage often topped 20 percent.

Roughly what breakage rate did early candy cane makers suffer when bending canes by hand?

The Keller Machine, patented in 1957, automated the twisting and cutting.

Which glass-working technique is fundamentally identical to the way candy canes are made by hand?

Smaller rods are subsumed into larger ones and rolled thin while the design is preserved; polymer clay uses the same method.

Which children's magazine mentioned 'candy-canes' in connection with Christmas in 1874?

An 1837 Massachusetts mechanics' exhibition record already mentions 'stick candy'.

Why, according to one belief, were peppermint canes originally hung on Christmas trees?

Peppermint is a natural animal deterrent.

In which English county was peppermint first identified, in the 1690s?

John Ray published Dr Eales's discovery in 1696; Linnaeus named the plant Mentha piperita in 1753.

Which country produced about 78% of the world's peppermint in 2023?

Argentina came second with 20%; in the US, Oregon and Washington grow most of the crop for oil.

How much did Arthur G. Spangler pay in 1906 for the baking-powder company that became Spangler Candy?

He moved the Gold Leaf Baking Powder Company from Defiance to Bryan, Ohio; candy only came in 1911.