26 December: National Candy Cane Day

Boxing Day is also National Candy Cane Day. A candy cane is a sugar stick, bent into the shape of a crook. They are usually red and white stripes and taste of peppermint, but other colours and flavours may be available as well. Here are ten things you may not know about these Christmas treats.

1. They've been around, in some form or other, since 1670. The legend has it that the then choirmaster at Cologne Cathedral in Germany got tired of bored children making a noise during the Christmas Nativity service. So he ordered candy sticks from a local sweet maker to keep them quiet.
2. They weren't just sweets, though. They were sweets with a message. With the top bent into the shape of a shepherd's crook they served to remind the children of the shepherds in the Christmas story. The sinless life of Jesus was represented by the White colour. Some say, too, that if you turn the cane upside down you get a letter J, for Jesus.
3. It might be an obvious conclusion to draw that the Red in a candy cane represented the Blood of Christ, but the original canes were plain white. We know this because images on cards from the 19^th century show them as being completely white. The red was only added in the early 20^th century. No one is sure exactly when or why the red stripes got added in.
4. German immigrants brought the tradition to the USA. The first reference to candy canes there dates to 1847, when August Imgard of Wooster, Ohio, decorated his Christmas Tree with them.
5. Back in the 1800s candy canes were made by hand in a labour intensive process in which the canes had to be bent by hand at the very end. Up to 20% of the canes would break at this point. In the early 1920s the Bunte Brothers filed one of the earliest patents for candy cane making machines, but it wasn't until 1957 that Gregory Harding Keller patented a machine that could automatically twist the candy into its characteristic shape.
6. Most candy canes are around five inches long, weigh about half an ounce, and contain about 50 calories and no fat or cholesterol – but a whole lot of sugar.
7. An exception is the one built in Geneva, Illinois in 2012 by chef Alain Roby. His candy cane was a record breaking 51 feet long, and required about 900 pounds of sugar to make. Once the record had been verified, the cane was smashed up into pieces so people could take a bit of it home. Most sources I looked at cited this as the official Guinness World Record for the largest candy cane ever. I did try to find this record on the actual Guinness World record site, aware the record could easily have been smashed by now, but my search for candy cane brought up hundreds of irrelevant results about candy in general. So as far as I can ascertain, this was the biggest candy cane ever at time of writing.
8. Surveys have shown that 54% of children eat a candy cane by sucking it while 24% (most often boys) crunch it right away.
9. Approximately 1.2 billion candy canes are made every year. 90% of them are sold between Thanksgiving and Christmas.
10. If you want candy canes on your tree but don't want the temptation of a sugary sweet, you can make slightly smaller ones from red and white pipe cleaners. Simply take a red pipe cleaner and a white one, twist them together and bend the top, and you have a sugar free candy cane for your tree.