The Sweet Secret of Christmas: 10 Things You Never Knew About Candy Canes

Every holiday season, a staggering **1.76 billion** candy canes are made in the United States alone. But beyond its festive stripes, this iconic sweet holds a surprisingly rich history, stretching back to 17th-century Germany where it was cleverly used to keep children quiet in church.

According to legend, the candy cane's story begins around 1670 at the Cologne Cathedral. The choirmaster, seeking a way to manage restless children during long services, had an idea. He asked a local candy maker to bend simple white sugar sticks into the shape of a shepherd's hook, then handed them out as a quiet treat.

The tradition crossed the Atlantic with a German immigrant. In 1847, August Imgard of Wooster, Ohio, decorated his Christmas tree with candy canes, introducing the custom to America and cementing its place in holiday culture.

But what about the iconic red stripes? For over 200 years, candy canes were pure white. While it's unclear who first added the scarlet stripe, images on Christmas cards from before the 1900s exclusively show the all-white version. The colorful design we know today came much later.

The move to mass production was driven by an American veteran and a Catholic priest. In the 1920s, Lt. Bob McCormack of Bobs Candies began making canes for his children. To scale up, his brother-in-law, a priest named Gregory Harding Keller, invented the 'Keller Machine', which automated the difficult bending process and allowed the company to churn out millions.

Today, the scale is immense. The Sugar Foundation reports that 1.76 billion candy canes are produced in the U.S. each year. Despite their ubiquity, they're a relatively light treat; a standard five-inch cane contains about 50 calories with no fat or cholesterol. The world's largest, however, was anything but small, measuring a record-breaking 36 feet and 7 inches, according to Guinness World Records.

And in a strange twist of timing, the official holiday for this Christmas staple isn't even on Christmas. December 26th is officially National Candy Cane Day.

PRISM Insight: The candy cane's journey is a microcosm of how cultural artifacts scale into global phenomena. It evolved from a hyper-local solution (a German choirmaster's crowd control tool) to a global symbol through migration, branding, and technological innovation (the Keller Machine). The annual production of over 1.7 billion units shows how a simple, sentimental object can become a powerful economic engine, demonstrating that cultural traditions are often significant, untapped markets.