A record of the 1837 exhibition of the
Massachusetts Charitable Mechanic Association, where confections were judged competitively, mentions "stick candy". A recipe for straight peppermint candy sticks, white with coloured stripes, was published in
The Complete Confectioner, Pastry-Cook, and Baker, in 1844. However, the earliest documentation of a "candy cane" is found in the short story "Tom Luther's Stockings", published in ''Ballou's Monthly Magazine
in 1866. Described as "mammoth" in size, no mention of colour or flavour was provided. The Nursery
monthly magazine mentions "candy-canes" in association with Christmas in 1874, and Babyland'' magazine describes "tall, twisted candy canes" being hung on a Christmas tree in 1882.
Animal deterrent Peppermint is a natural animal deterrent. It is believed that
peppermint candy canes were originally hung on Christmas trees to keep rodents and other small animals, including cats, from damaging Christmas trees.
Religious affiliation A common story of the origin of candy canes says that in 1670, in
Cologne,
Germany, the choirmaster at
Cologne Cathedral, wishing to remedy the noise caused by children in his
church during the
Living Crèche tradition of
Christmas Eve, asked a local
candy maker for some "sugar sticks" for them. In order to justify the practice of giving candy to children during
Mass, he asked the candy maker to add a crook to the top of each stick, which would help children remember the shepherds who visited the
infant Jesus. This story is likely apocryphal, with references to it not existing before the mid-20th century.
Production As with other forms of stick candy, the earliest canes were manufactured by hand. Chicago confectioners, the Bunte Brothers, filed one of the earliest patents for candy cane making machines in the early 1920s.
Caneworking is a method used originally to create complex designs in long "canes" of glass, by which smaller rods are subsumed into larger rods and subsequently rolled into minute diameters while preserving the design. Examples of this are
murrine and
millefiori glass ornaments. While candy canes are often shaped into curved walking-style canes, it should be mentioned that the process by which they are made by hand is called candy caning, or candy caneworking. It is fundamentally identical to glass canework, and caneworking is also used with clay polymer. In 1919, in
Albany, Georgia, Robert McCormack began making candy canes for local children, and by the middle of the century, his company (originally the Famous Candy Company, then the Mills-McCormack Candy Company, and later
Bobs Candies) had become one of the world's leading candy cane producers. Candy cane manufacturing initially required significant labour that limited production quantities; the canes had to be bent manually as they came off the assembly line to create their curved shape, and breakage often ran over 20 percent. McCormack's brother-in-law, Gregory Harding Keller, was a seminary student in
Rome who spent his summers working in the candy factory back home. In 1957, Keller, as an ordained
Roman Catholic priest of the
Diocese of Little Rock, patented his invention, the
Keller Machine, which automated the process of twisting soft candy into spiral striping and cutting it into precise lengths as candy canes. ==Use during Saint Nicholas Day==