My favorite Christmas memory happened perhaps 35 years ago.
I was at an unremarkable gas station in an unremarkable town near Cincinnati, putting gas into my (unremarkable) car. It was snowing lightly, and I was cold.
Along with the other people filling up their cars of varying degrees of remarkability, there was also Santa Claus. He was spreading joy by reaching into his bag and handing out candy canes to everyone at the gas station, including me.
I fully recognize that this incident may seem a little mild to qualify as a favorite Christmas memory. But maybe I’m shallow. Maybe my memory just isn’t very good.
Or maybe it was just that this guy’s simple act of selfless good cheer rang the right silver bell with me. He didn’t have to be there in the cold and the snow. He didn’t have to buy what looked to be a fairly substantial number of candy canes. And he didn’t have to go to the trouble of acquiring a Santa suit.
At any rate, the act made me happy — disproportionately happy.
It also made me wonder about candy canes. Where do they come from? Why do we associate them with Christmas?
There are plenty of theories, but most of them seem to be probably false. What is known is that straight, long sugar candies have been around for centuries. They have been bent into the shape of a cane possibly since 1670 (a popular, though frustratingly unverifiable, legend is that the choirmaster in Cologne, Germany, asked a candymaker to bend them — the shape would call to mind a shepherd’s crook, with the symbolism that entails — and gave them to children to occupy them during Mass).
The first known written mention of candy canes in English came only in 1866, in a story published in Ballou’s Monthly Magazine. The first known written association with Christmas came eight years later in a story about a child’s letter to Santa.
It is believed that candy canes became a Christmas item because they could be hung on trees as ornaments, and that is in fact how they were typically used. It is known that the colored stripes have been around at least since 1844, though that reference was to straight candies. We don’t see pictures of the striped candies with the hook on top, what we associate now with candy canes, until the turn of the 20th century.
Thinking about candy canes naturally led to contemplations of other holiday foods, such as chestnuts on an open fire (self-explanatory), Yule logs (basically a thin chocolate cake rolled up with vanilla cream, like a jelly roll) and sugar plums (I had no idea).
All I knew about sugar plums is that visions of them dance poetically in the heads of snugly nestled children and that fairies of the sugar plum variety dance to music played on a celesta.
If I’d had to hazard a guess, I probably would have said that sugar plums are plums that have been dipped in sugar, or perhaps a marzipan-like candy shaped like a plum and rolled in sugar.
But that would have been quite wrong, and a little unpleasant (I’m not a fan of marzipan). Sugar plums turn out to be little balls of chopped dates and apricots mixed with spices (cinnamon, allspice, nutmeg), laced with orange zest and bound together with almonds and honey, and then dusted with powdered sugar.
OK, that sounds great. And they are said to taste even better as they age, up to a month.
Candy canes are nice. But if I encounter Santa again this year, I think I’m going to ask if he has any sugar plums.
Incidentally, I paid him back last year. I was in line at Ted Drewes, and so was Santa. But he was busy posing for what seemed like an endless stream of selfies. So I bought him his ice cream. It seemed like the least I could do.
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