- When it is kept
- All season
- Where it fits in the year
- All through the season
Hard candy sticks, the ancestors of the candy cane, are reported from the 1600s in Europe. They were white, not striped.1,2 The earliest known printed mention of candy canes is an 1866 short story called "Tom Luther’s Stockings".3 Red stripes show up on Christmas cards around 1900, but nobody knows who first added them.5,1 The hook may have started as a way to hang the candy on a tree. That is a guess, not a record.2,5
Robert McCormack began making candy canes for local children in Albany, Georgia, in 1919, and his company became Bobs Candies.3,6,7 Hand-bent canes broke often, so his brother-in-law, a Catholic priest named Gregory Keller, invented a bending machine in the 1950s that made canes in large numbers. Sources give 1952, 1957 and 1958 for the machine.3,7,1
A legend, not history
A story says a candymaker in Indiana shaped a J for Jesus, with white for purity and red stripes for his blood. It is traced to a 1996 children’s book and to forwarded emails from the mid-1990s. Candy sticks are older than the state of Indiana.5,1,3