December 24, 2009

• Origins of the Candy Cane

  

  This post is minty fresh, unlike recent holiday reposts.  Inspiration came from the Kid, who asked me this morning if I knew the origin of the candy cane.  He was inspired by a serial killer in the Ressurection Man comic, who killed people with a sharpened candy cane.  I had no answer but “no” to the Kid’s question, but I was sitting at the computer, so I googled it.

  The top result was a known reliable source, Snopes.com, so I pulled up it and two others, to get a range of perspectives.  Then I started reading.

  Apparently, there’s a widespread myth that goes something like this:

  …a faithful Indiana candymaker developed the treat as a witnessing tool. The candy is hard because God’s church is founded on the rock, white because of Jesus’s purity (or his virgin birth), peppermint flavored as a reference to cleansing hyssop, and curved to represent a shepherd’s staff and/or the letter “J” for Jesus. Accounts vary regarding the red stripes, though they all agree that red stands for Christ’s blood. Depending on which story you read, three small stripes might represent the Trinity, or small stripes could mean the stripes by which we’re healed, or our small sacrifices in comparison to Christ’s ultimate sacrifice (represented by a large stripe). One site even suggested that the green stripe sometimes featured reminds us that Jesus is a gift from God….

  Christianity Today

  According to Snopes.com:

  It has become fashionable of late to claim that the candy cane was not only designed to be fraught with Christian religious symbolism, but that it was created as a means by which persecuted Christians could furtively identify each other.  Like the apocryphal tale of the meaning of the song “The Twelve Days of Christmas,” these claims are fiction — latter day attempts to infuse secular holiday traditions with specific religious origins and meanings.

  Snopes debunked the myth in pretty much the same terms that Ex-Christian.net did:

  Candy canes were around long before there was an Indiana, and they initially bore neither red coloration nor striping — the red stripes were a feature that did not appear until a few hundred years later, at the beginning of the 20th century:

  About 1847, August Imgard of Ohio managed to decorate his Christmas tree with candy canes to entertain his nephews and nieces. Many who saw his canes went home to boil sugar and experiment with canes of their own. It took nearly another half century before someone added stripes to the canes . . . Christmas cards produced before 1900 show plain white canes, while striped ones appear on many cards printed early in the 20th century.

  In fact, the strongest connection one can make between the origins of the candy cane and intentional Christian symbolism is to note that legend says someone took an existing form of candy which was already being used as a Christmas decoration (i.e., straight white sticks of sugar candy) and produced bent versions which represented a shepherd’s crook and were handed out to children at church to ensure their good behavior:

  Soon after Europeans adopted the use of Christmas trees, they began making special decorations for them. Food items predominated, with cookies and candy heavily represented. That is when straight, white sticks of sugar candy came into use at Christmas, probably during the seventeenth century.

  Tradition has it that some of these candies were put to use in Cologne Cathedral about 1670 while restless youngsters were attending ceremonies around the living creche. To keep them quiet, the choirmaster persuaded craftsmen to make sticks of candy bent at the end to represent shepherds’ crooks, then he passed them out to boys and girls who came to the cathedral.

  Claims made about the candy’s religious symbolism have become increasingly widespread as religious leaders have assured their congregations that these mythologies are factual, the press have published these claims as authoritative answers to readers’ inquiries about the confection’s meaning, and several lavishly illustrated books purport to tell the “true story” of the candy cane’s origins. This is charming folklore at best, and though there’s nothing wrong with finding (and celebrating) symbolism where there wasn’t any before, the story of the candy cane’s origins is — like Santa Claus — a myth, not a “true story.”

  Happy Santanalia, Everyone

  In case you missed some of it, here’s the entire list of previous svwX blog entries:
  1.   Why postpone the joy?
  2.   Two Patriotic (Xmas) Poems – Giving the Authors their Due
  3.   White Christmas  by Robert W. Service (not my #1 favorite Xmas poem by him, but pretty good anyway, in its own sentimental way)
  4.   All about Christmas trees
  5.   Holidays are Hazardous (political correctness and other evils)
  6.   svwX – turning the 12 days of Christmas upside-down and backwards
  7.   Born in a Manger (origin and history of the crèche or Nativity scene)
  8.   Holiday Treats for Gifts or for Eating – six recipes:  3 sugary & 3 gluten-free lo-cal
  9.   Io Saturnalia! – ancient history
  10. It really is a WONDERFUL LIFE. – Featured Grownups essay on how I made my little world a better place.
  11. Xmas in War and Something Else – war and peace with a seasonal twist, in poetry, pictures, cartoons, etc.
  12. Winter Solstice – Sacred Survival (archaeoastronomy and diverse traditions)
  13. How did reindeer get involved, anyway?
  14. Mistletoe, Holly, Ivy, Poinsettias and Yule Logs
  15. Draggin’ the Tree (cowboy Christmas poetry)
  16. The Trapper’s Christmas Eve and The Christmas Tree by Robert W. Service
  17. The Ancestry and Evolution of Santa Claus
  18. A bonus from yesteryear:  The Elves and Gnomes of Christmas
  …also, unnumbered, unheralded, unworthy of attention by anyone except one with a seriously sick sense of humor, this.

  • 4:26 pm
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