These candy canes, left over from Christmas, are reminiscent of several times when we bit off the ends and used them as straws, taking advantage of their long tubular bubbles, to suck up syrupy fruit punch; and the times I went on field trips with the girl scouts to watch them being made, watching from outside the window of the candy shop as the man folded and folded the clear liquid sugar until it was cool enough to touch, on our tiptoes to see as he pulled it again and again over the big hook, folding it and pulling it until it had enough air inside to be pure white, and then adding the red and stretching it thin and cutting it and bending it into hooks, and then giving us all a sample while they were still warm; and how often we would use them to decorate our Christmas tree at home, or at least the one at church, as they liked to use the opportunity to tell us about the symbolism: J for Jesus and also the shape of a shepherd's staff, simultaneously, while the three thin stripes are the trinity and the thick one is there to remind us of the blood shed on our behalf, all the more meaningful when juxtaposed with Christ's pure white-as-snow candy nature; and the winter when we opened the Christmas decoration boxes to find that they had all vanished, leaving but a transparent cellophane shell to prove that they had been there at all--this phenomenon being attributed at the time to either ants or straight-up disintegration, but quite possibly to neither of those things, we never knew for sure; and sharpening them to points with which to stab each other's fleshy upper arms in the backseat of the car; and elementary school holiday parties where we glued googly eyes and red pom-poms and brown pipe cleaners to them, to create reindeer; all of this without having ever particularly enjoyed the taste.
