A Bent Peppermint Stick to Shut You Kids Up! Cologne Cathedral the Year 1670 and the History Behind the Making of the Modern Candy Cane

 

Construction on the grand cathedral in Cologne, Germany, began in the year 1248--when the Mongol Empire ruled half of the known world and when a young Dominican Friar from Italy named Thomas Aquinas had just begun writing his Summa Theologica--a comprehensive compendium of all Catholic thought up until that point in history.

It would not be completed for over 600 more years until 1880--the year when electric streetlights were first installed in the United States of America, in the relatively small town of Wabash, Indiana surprisingly, and when Russian author Fyodor Dostoyevsky completed work on his final novel, The Brothers Karamazov, which was considered a magnum opus on the relatively new nineteenth century doctrines of modern Atheism and Agnosticism.

Cologne Cathedral is one of Europe’s finest surviving examples of gothic architecture from the High Middle Ages and was declared a World Heritage Site in 1996.  According to Wikipedia, Cologne Cathedral is Germany’s most visited landmark and attracts over 20,000 visitors each day!

Majestic Cologne Cathedral

What we know as modern day Germany was not first established until well into the 19th century, and at the time of its construction, Cologne Cathedral was located in a region named North Rhine-Westphalia and it was, and still is, the seat of the Archbishop of Cologne.

The original plan for Cologne Cathedral was on such a grand and ornate scale, that due to exorbitant costs, construction on the cathedral was halted after over three centuries of continuous work sometime around the year 1560.  Then, for nearly the next three hundred years, progress stopped with the construction near completion until being resumed again, just prior to the end of the costly Napoleonic Wars in the year 1814.

Despite being Germany’s most popular tourist attraction; despite having spires that reach hundreds of feet into the heavens and despite being one of Catholic Europe’s holiest sites, Cologne Cathedral has one other claim to everlasting fame and notoriety. (Maybe.)

It is said that Cologne Cathedral is the place where the world’s favorite Christmas time treat, the candy cane, was first born.

Just as in many parishes across the Christian world, it was and still is, a tradition in Cologne Cathedral to perform on Christmas Eve each year something called a Living Creche performance.

Essentially, a Living Creche play, or performance, is a Nativity Scene that is acted out by real people.  Living Creche performances were created in the thirteenth century (around the same time that construction started on the Cologne Cathedral as a matter of fact) by Saint Francis of Assisi.  For more information on that see this article from Creative History from last Christmas  https://creativehistorystories.blogspot.com/2021/12/putting-christ-back-in-medieval.html  which describes in detail how and why all this acting out the birth of Jesus in real time on Christmas Eve first came about.

Inside Cologne Cathedral

Anyway, Living Creche performances have a tendency to be rather long and they often contain a seemingly endless amount of Christmas carols each one dedicated to the glorification of our Lord and Savior Jesus Christ.  

Every member, including the youngest ones, of the church choir participates in the Living Creche performance, and since these long Nativity plays with musical accompaniment tend to be performed on Christmas Eve night, it’s no surprise that many of the kids, whose parents probably forced them to go to church anyway, tend to either begin to fall asleep, or simply stop paying attention because visions of Christmas morning sugarplums (whatever they are!) begin dancing in their heads.

Legend has it, that during one of these lengthy and somewhat boring Living Creche performances at Cologne Cathedral in the year 1670, in an effort to keep his young kid singers focused and awake, the choirmaster gave the children peppermint sticks that he had bent into the shape of shepherd’s crooks as Christmas Eve treats.  

Peppermint sticks, as a Christmas treat in Europe, had been around for centuries prior to 1670, but according to tradition in order to justify handing out candy during a holy Christmas mass, the choirmaster of Cologne Cathedral had to have his peppermint sticks bent into the shape of canes to represent shepherd’s crooks and thereby enable him to integrate the candies into the Cathedral’s Living Creche Nativity performance.

Supposedly, from that moment in 1670 on in Germany at least, what we now know as the candy cane became a Christmas confectionary tradition.  Folklore has it that kids across Europe started to hope that these new-fangled bent peppermint sticks called “candy canes” would appear either in their Christmas stockings on the morning of December 25th or, even earlier in the month, on December 5th or 6th in honor of “St. Nicholas Day”.  

St. Nicholas Day is a holy Catholic feast day of observation that is still widely celebrated among Catholics in Europe.  On that day, celebrated during the first week of December, it is also common for children to receive peppermint sticks, or candy cane like treats, which are said to represent Catholic Bishop crosiers much like those carried by Saint Nicholas of Myra who was said to be a shepherd to the Catholic masses in Asia Minor during the early 4th century.



Today, the Catholic observance of Saint Nicholas Day, the celebration of the birth of Jesus on Christmas Day, candy canes and even Santa Claus have all become convoluted into one tangled mass of holiday traditions, but they each have unique and interesting histories.

Oddly, enough, aside from their use during the Living Creche performances at Cologne Cathedral as early as the year 1670, the other earliest documented use of Christmas candy canes that I could find comes from http://www.candyhistory.net which stated that, “The first documented example of the use of candy canes to celebrate Christmas occurred in 1847 when August Imgard, a German-Swedish immigrant, from Wooster, Ohio decorated his Christmas tree with paper ornaments and candy canes.”

Apparently, though, this is a reference to the first American use of candy canes to celebrate Christmas and also, it appears that it wasn’t until the 1840’s, that candy canes began to be decorated with alternating red, white and even pink stripes.

A lot of people believe that the candy cane, and its alternating stripes, are rife with Christian imagery and meaning.  However, aside from the legend of the Cologne Cathedral and the year 1670, it is difficult to find any concrete evidence to support the contention that the alternating stripes of red, pink and white represent the Holy Trinity and the Blood of Christ, though most sources agree that “Candy Canes” should actually be called “Candy Crooks” since they were in reality most likely straight peppermint stick candy that was bent into the shape of hooks to represent a shepherd’s staff.


Victorian Era Christmas Tree with Candy Canes as Ornaments


Were candy canes invented by a frustrated choirmaster at Cologne Cathedral in the year 1670 to keep a bunch of kids quiet and focused during a late-night Christmas Eve Mass?  Possibly, maybe even likely because as anyone who has, or has ever had little kids knows, sometimes we’ll do anything to shut those kids up even if it means bending candy into the shape of hooks and handing them out during a reenactment of the Birth of Jesus.

Today, candy canes are the most popular Holiday candy in the world.  In fact, nearly two-billion candy canes are made each year in the United States alone!  Of these two-billion candy canes, not surprisingly, ninety percent are sold between the months of November and December, with perhaps as many as half being used solely for decoration because unless you're seven years old, or it’s the year 1670 in Cologne, Germany and you have to sit through a long play in the middle of the night, the idea of eating an entire candy cane is gross.

Merry Christmas from Creative History!  (No offense to anyone who may love candy canes!  My kids love them too!)

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