'Sweet' History

What little-known U.S. holiday is celebrated on December 26? It's National Candy Cane Day.

Here's some candy cane history that will satisfy even the sweet tooth of a holiday historian:

•The history of candy canes dates back to December 1670, when the choirmaster of the Cologne Cathedral in Germany gave sugar sticks in the shape of shepherds' crooks to his young singers to keep them silent during a long performance of "The Nativity".

•In 1847, German immigrant August Ingaid unknowingly started a holiday tradition when he decorated a small spruce tree in his Ohio home with bent [sugar] sticks. But it wasn't until the turn of the century that red and white stripes and peppermint flavors were added to the sticks, and they were renamed candy canes.

•In the mid-1920s, Robert McCormack, of Albany, Georgia, made candy canes for his children as Christmas treats, shaping the sticks by hand, adding the peppermint flavor and painting the stripes with red food coloring.

It wasn't until the late 1950s that the sticks were mass produced. That's when McCormack's brother-in-law, Gregory Keller, invented a machine to produce candy canes. Months later, Keller engineered packaging used to ship the candy canes to retailers on a large scale without breaking- and the rest is history!

•New-millennium manufacturers produce more than 1.76 billion candy canes each year, enough to line the route to and from Santa's North Pole workshop 32 times.

How big was the biggest candy cane ever made in the U.S.? What did it weigh and how tall did it measure? It weighed more than 100 pounds, and stood a whopping 5-feet, 2-inches tall.

- Liz Goff