How Peppermint Came To Dominate The Holiday Season

We know that peppermint-flavored-everything is symbolic of the start of the holiday season (alongside the Starbucks holiday menu), but the "why" is a bit murkier. How did mint become the poster child for the holidays? Why do we get festive, make merry, and stock up on candy canes?

The unabridged answer of the peppermint's origin story dates back to the Middle Ages when massive, celebratory winter feasts took place following the harvest of fields and livestock. Those rich, filling meals required a natural digestive to help move things through the system and ward off any potential discomfort from overindulging. Fortunately, mint was plentiful and easily added to teas, sweets, and other post-dinner delicacies. 

The next notable record of peppermint around the holidays is in Cologne, Germany, in 1670. Legend says that a choirmaster needed something to keep children quiet during a Christmas Eve mass, so he asked a local candymaker to create "sugar sticks" that they could enjoy during the service. The choirmaster asked that the sticks were white to represent the absence of sin and shaped like a "J" to represent Jesus. Centuries later, the "sugar sticks" would take over in America, albeit under a completely different name.

The candy cane we know today showed up in Massachusetts in the early 1800s. During a candy-making contest, someone entered a striped peppermint candy stick with a hook. At this time, candy canes were made by hand in specialty shops, which was labor intensive and expensive. Adding a hook to the stick often resulted in the candy breaking, thus rendering about 20 percent of the canes broken and unusable. But the process was about to improve. 

In the early 1860s, three brothers, Ferdinand, Gustavus, and Albert Bunte immigrated from Germany to Philadelphia. Stiff competition among candy confectioners on the East coast drove them to Chicago in 1876, where they opened the candy company Bunte Bros & Spoehr with fellow German immigrant, Charles Spoehr. By 1920, Ferdinand's sons, Theodore and Charles, took over operations. The innovative duo worked in tandem: Charles handled sales and advertising; Theodore led operations and new products, including candy canes. In 1921, Theodore Bunte had one of the first-ever patents on a candy-cane-making machine. His invention spurred the sharing of festive holiday candy canes nationwide with wholesalers, grocery stores, and pharmacists. But Theodore wasn't the only man working on a better way to share candy canes with the masses.

In 1924, Bob McCormack and Bob Mills went into business together making candies at a factory in Albany, Georgia. Bobs Candies, as it was called, became known for its chocolates and candies — including candy canes. In addition to producing quality sweets, Bobs Candies dabbled in process improvement and product preservation. The company invented a packaging to prevent candy canes from breaking while they were being shipped around the country. And in 1957, McCormack's brother-in-law, Father Harding Keller, invented the Keller Machine. This new invention uniformly cut candy canes and twisted them in large batches, thus reducing labor costs and increasing the number of viable canes to sell to the general public.

Since then, candy canes have continued to play a special role around the holidays. You'll find them in stockings, hanging on Christmas trees, and even as a novelty garnish with a steaming mug of hot chocolate or crushed on the rim of a chocolate peppermint martini. Now that you know why peppermint is associated with the holiday season, use it as a conversation starter.