Traditions and Trivia: Candy Canes

The candy cane is an interesting artifact as they have a common origin story that has been debunked.

A popular version is told in many churches to children, involving an Indiana man who decided to spice up the plain, white stick candy.

He first made it into a J shape, symbolizing either Jesus or a shepherd’s staff, then striped it red to symbolize the blood Jesus shed.

An older and more catholic version involves a 15th century priest at Germany's Cologne Cathedral, who in an effort to sate restless children, would provide candy to keep them quiet during long services.

In order to make it a lesson (and more readily accepted by parents and elders), he worked with the candy maker to make pure white canes that would represent the shepherd’s staff and purity of Jesus.

However, according to snopes.com, neither of these have historical basis, “it exists only in the form of anecdote, recorded no earlier than the mid-20th century.”

Snopes also mentions that “Christmas cards produced before 1900 show plain white canes, but striped canes only started to appear on Christmas cards at the beginning of the 20th century.”

However, in recent times many have been retroactively associating the candy with Christianity, to the delight or consternation of others.

Whether or not they were shaped specifically to be a ‘J’ or shepherd’s staff, or just curved to better hang on trees, they are a popular Christmas treat.

The American origin story of the man in Indiana has been a popular forwarded email as early as 1997.