Grace and the Candy Cane on Christmas Eve

Merry Christmas everyone!

This is the first Christmas Eve since 2019 that we’ve been able to gather here in this building. That’s hard to believe, really. Last year we were close—very close—because we’d been back with a congregation here since that July, but it was on the 23rd that the Anglican parishes in this diocese received an email message from our bishop, advising us that due to a significant spike in covid cases, we’d be wise to not gather a big congregation for Christmas Eve. A quick check with a senior physician who is a member of our church confirmed that the bishop’s counsel was indeed on target, so back to an online version of the service we went. We all understood, of course, but it was more than a little discouraging.

But you know, we’re not quite back to the old familiar, are we? We’re still masking as we move about the church, and when the liturgy is finished we won’t be hauling out our big trays of baking and Christmas sherry to serve to everyone who wants to stay on for a bit. We’re afraid that just isn’t yet a wise thing to do, so instead we’ve put together little boxes of things for each household to take home with them. Inside those boxes you’ll find some cookies baked by folks from our community, a candle representing that line we heard read from Isaiah—“The people who walked in darkness have seen a great light”—and a candy cane.

Now I have to be honest here and say that I’m a bit of a traditionalist, and so while we could have gone with any number of flavours—you can get pumpkin pie candy canes or coffee ones or ones with soft drink flavours, all in colours meant to match the taste—there was no question that you were going to get peppermint! Not only peppermint, but a white cane with three red stripes and one green stripe. Old school, in other words.

But it is funny, because a little research turns up the fact that this isn’t quite as old school as one might assume. Okay, it is sometime around the year 1900 that the peppermint flavour and the stripes began to emerge and soon became the standard, so we’ve got about a hundred and twenty years of tradition represented here, which isn’t nothing. But let’s go back into the story behind this version of the candy cane.

The oldest story of the candy cane goes back to 1670, when a choirmaster at Cologne Cathedral in Germany was said to have bent candy sugar-sticks into canes representing a shepherd’s staff—the Good Shepherd’s staff—to help keep his choir boys quiet during long liturgical services. This tradition apparently spread in Germany, with families hanging the canes from the branches of Christmas trees, the trees themselves being a German innovation from that time.

This then slowly spread throughout Europe, and through German immigration eventually to North America, but at this point they were just plain white sugar candy. It was then around 1900 that stripes began to be added, as is shown in historical Christmas cards from that period, and at the same time peppermint emerged as the classic flavour. In 1919, a candy maker named Bob McCormack began making candy canes, and within a few decades his company became famous for them.

Now I was taught a host of symbols connected to what became that standard peppermint candy cane—that the shape represented a shepherd’s crook, which is probably the surest symbol of all, but also that the white was for the purity of Jesus’s life, the red stripes marked his sacrifice for us in the crucifixion, the green his resurrected life, and the peppermint represented the burial spices prepared by the women to anoint Jesus’s broken body.

And yet the historians who attend to such things aren’t so sure. In his World Encyclopedia of Christmas, Gerry Bowler suggests that such symbolism “seems to be pious retrojections dating from the modern period.” In other words, the candy colour and flavour came first—in the early 20th Century—and the interpretation then followed.

But you know, regardless of the origins of this symbolism, it still speaks to the story we tell tonight. The peppermint candy cane you’ll take home with its mix of white, red, and green can be interpreted as imagery of the Good Shepherd’s life, death, and resurrection; a mix of things both hard and lovely, which is so very true of the nativity story from Luke.

The story can come across as lovely and quaint, but that’s only because it has been told and retold so many times and then shown in countless paintings and Christmas cards that speak more of the warmth of the scene than of anything else. Yet back out for a minute to that opening line which says that “a decree went out from Emperor Augustus that all the world should be registered.” That’s a decree coming from the head of an empire that has subjected much of that world to its harsh military rule, and the only purpose of a census was for taxation and control. And as Luke tells the story, the routine for the census was for folks to travel back to their ancestral homes, where they might no longer even have any relatives. Again, that’s an empire making the people under its rule do what they are told; it speaks to the power and tyranny of Rome in those lands. And as the story unfolds, it is clear that Mary is really in no shape to travel, but what does an emperor care about a pregnant peasant girl? And so they end up in a stable, and sometime that night the baby is born, wrapped in bands of cloth, and put to sleep in a manger; in a feed trough.

Have you been in a barn where animals are kept? For the women here who have had a baby, is this the kind of place where you’d want to spend your labour and the first hours of your baby’s life? Right? You begin to sense just how desperate this young couple would have been that night. 

Meanwhile, Luke tells us, an angel—literally “a messenger”—appears to shepherds out in the fields, bringing them news of this birth and saying “to you is born this day in the city of David a Saviour, who is the Messiah, the Lord.” Now again, we tend to have a very prettified image of biblical shepherds, but theirs was not easy work. It tended to fall to people who were pretty much at the edge of things socially and politically, and often as not it was a role filled by women and children. They are pretty much without status or power in their world, and yet, Luke tells us, they are the first to receive the “good news of great joy.” As Bruce Cockburn put it in his song, “Cry of a Tiny Baby,”

There are others who know about this miracle birth
The humblest of people catch a glimpse of their worth
For it isn’t to the palace that the Christ child comes
But to shepherds and street people, hookers and bums
(Bruce Cockburn, Nothing But A Burning Light, True North, 1991)

The angel comes to shepherds, of all people, which—as Cockburn rightly sings—means it is the Christ child who has come to the shepherds and all of the last and the least and the lost… which is all of us, if we’re honest about ourselves. And then he continues,

And the message is clear if you’ve got ears to hear
That forgiveness is given for your guilt and your fear
It’s a Christmas gift you don’t have to buy
There’s a future shining in a baby’s eyes

So with that candy cane, just pay a little attention to the green stripe. For ultimately that stripe representing resurrection and life is all about that “future shining in a baby’s eyes”. And it does.

Have a happy and blessed Christmas season.