Candy cane

Is the J for Jesus?

No record supports it. Snopes examined three versions. The claim that persecuted Christians used the canes to recognise each other is “directly contradicted by history”, since the stories themselves place the candy in the late 17th century, when Europe was almost wholly Christian. The story of a choirmaster at Cologne Cathedral who in 1670 had sugar sticks bent into shepherd’s crooks to keep the choirboys quiet “exists only in the form of anecdote, recorded no earlier than the mid-20th century”; Arkansas Catholic also calls it unsubstantiated. The candymaker in Indiana said to have made the J and stained it with three thin stripes and one broad one for the scourging and the cross has no name and no documentation. Snopes traces the spread of the story to religious leaders who told their congregations it was true, and to children’s books such as Helen Haidle’s The Candymaker’s Gift (1996), Lori Walburg’s The Legend of the Candy Cane (1997) and Alice Joyce Davidson’s The “J” Is for Jesus (1998). Even the idea that someone bent the white Christmas sticks to make a crook, or to hang them on trees, is in Snopes’s words “mere supposition”. The one verifiable church connection is Father Keller’s machine.