Christmas Sweets 2026 · November
Sugar, in colour.
In October we opened the pantry. In November, the sweets come out.
Before colour came in bottles, confectioners coloured their sweets with what the larder gave them: red from sandalwood, pink from rose petals, blue from mulberry juice, yellow from saffron, green from spinach. This new paper is our colour run: candy canes, oranges and sprinkles, collaged into one sheet.
With food historian Dr Eleanor Barnett
RED
Candy canes
Legend says that in 1670 the choirmaster of Cologne Cathedral asked a confectioner for sugar sticks to keep the children quiet during the nativity play, bent like a shepherd's crook. It is probably not true. What we do know: in 1844, a recipe from Philadelphia kept peppermint candy perfectly white, except for the stripes, laid on by hand before the sugar was pulled into long sticks and twisted. The trade card comes from the same city, a few decades later.
A SMALL IDEA
Tie one on
Slip a candy cane under the ribbon of a present. It is the gift tag and the first sweet at once.
ORANGE
Oranges
Oranges were a winter luxury, brought from Spain and Italy at great cost. On St Nicholas' night they went into the shoe, standing in for the gold he once left for three sisters. Dried slices still hang on the tree today.
TO MAKE
Dried orange slices
Slice an orange thinly, lay the slices on baking paper and dry them at 90 °C for about three hours, turning them now and then. Thread them on ribbon for the tree, or tie one onto a present.
PINK
Rose and sugar
Long before food colouring came in bottles, rose petals turned sugar pink. It is the softest colour in the tin: meringues, marshmallows and sugared almonds. The flower on the old plate is another rose: the Christmas rose, which blooms in the snow and is on the paper too. Unlike rose petals, it never went into sweets.
COLOURFUL
Colour in a bottle
In 1856, an 18 year old chemist in London, William Perkin, was trying to make quinine and made the first synthetic dye instead: a bright purple, from coal tar. Within a few decades confectioners could buy any colour in a bottle, and sweets became brighter than anything the larder could give. Pink, violet, lemon and emerald, all in one jar.
To wrap and to send
In 19th century France, confectioners wrapped sugared almonds in twisted papers called bonbons. Sweets have always come with something to wrap them in, and a few words to go with them.
PAY WITH TWINT
It came to you as a present, wrapped in a linen cloth. Your grandmother’s cookbook, which had belonged to her mother before her.
Open it and the years drift up from the paper: clove oil, browned butter, the bittersweet ghost of orange peel, a breath of vanilla trapped in the binding. The first pages are all Christmas dinner: roast goose, red cabbage, dumplings. You skip past them, straight to the desserts and biscuits. Not one recipe here has survived untouched. Every page has been annotated, adjusted, argued with.
The first is a gingerbread house, its plans traced from a women’s magazine in 1958 and pasted in with flour and water, every wall and roof panel measured in inches. Your grandmother has added a chimney in pencil and written boil the sugar for the windows until it turns amber. Beneath, a note about the icing: glue the roof the night before. Trust me. Then her own hand, rounder, quicker: Seville orange peel, to be candied in January and hidden until Advent.
A printed card from a packet of icing sugar, peppermint creams, corrected in pencil: too sweet, add lemon. Quince cheese that sets overnight into garnet squares. Butter biscuits stamped into stars and hearts, with a line added in your mother’s hand: let the children do the sprinkles. A few still cling to the page, tiny beads of coral, mint and lemon yellow, pressed into the paper by a sticky thumb. Rum truffles rolled in cocoa, with a note underlined twice: not for the children. You remember stealing three.
Rose and vanilla marshmallows, snipped into pillows with kitchen scissors and dusted in cornflour, with a reminder to drop two into every cup of hot chocolate after carol singing, where they slowly sink and bloom. And the candy canes, sugar pulled on a buttered marble slab and twisted with crimson, a recipe you have starred since you were nine and never once made. This might be the year.
At the very back lies a hellebore, pressed flat the winter your great grandmother married. Christmas roses, she called them, and every year she told their story: a shepherd girl with no gift wept in the snow, and where her tears fell, these flowers opened.
This year you sit at the kitchen table with your own pen. You write: ginger and sour cherry florentines, thin as glass. Then you close the book and reach for the marble slab. By Christmas the kitchen will smell of every page at once… caramel darkening in the pan, cloves pressed into oranges, cinnamon warming the windows, peppermint sharp as frost.
Outside, under the snow, the hellebores are opening.
PAY WITH TWINT
Long before he had a sleigh, he had a pocket full of oranges.
The old stories say Nicholas, a bishop in Myra, once dropped three bags of gold through a poor man’s window by night, so his daughters could marry. Over the centuries the gold became oranges, tucked into the toes of stockings, and the bishop grew a white beard, a red coat, and a laugh you could hear three rooftops away.
But oranges alone no longer fill his sack. So for weeks before Christmas, he makes sweets in his own kitchen. He boils sugar in copper pans until it turns amber, pulls it on a hook until it shines like silk, and twists in a stripe of cherry red. Each one he bends into a cane, shaped like the bishop’s staff he once carried. Beside them, meringues dry by the stove in rose and pistachio, blood orange slices are dipped in dark chocolate, and pink gumballs rattle into glass jars.
On Christmas Eve he sets out with all of it. No lane is too narrow, no village too far. Down chimneys, past sleeping cats, around the painted nutcracker standing guard on the sideboard. He fills stockings to the brim, leaves an orange in every toe, and is gone before the embers settle… almost. Listen closely and you might catch it, drifting back over the roofs.
Ho ho ho.
Write a few lines and send this card ahead of him, a small herald in the winter post. Somewhere above the rooftops, he is already on his way.
PAY WITH TWINT
In the confectioner’s window, every flower was made of sugar. Except one.
Every December, snow settled over the old square and its rose, sage and butter yellow houses. In her little confectioner’s shop, she filled the window with sweets. Gingerbread hearts swung on red ribbons, laced with fine white icing. For the green vines, she squeezed spinach through a cloth until a few bright drops dripped into the sugar. Pink meringues tumbled into soft piles. Candied mandarins caught the lamplight like coloured glass, and a pinch of saffron turned their syrup to gold. Paper stars drifted over everything, and the scent of honey, cinnamon and warm butter spilled out onto the cobbles.
But the heart of the window always belonged to a flower. Every year, she boiled sugar in a copper pan and stirred in a drop of cochineal, a deep red crushed from tiny insects, once worth more than silver. The sugar blushed pink. She stretched it across cold marble until it gleamed like silk. She coaxed each petal into shape by hand, thin enough to let the light through. And every year, before Christmas, the petals cracked.
She tried everything. A cooler kitchen. A warmer one. More sugar, less water. Still the petals shattered.
One winter the snow came early. She worked deep into the night, until the oven cooled and the candles burned down to stubs. She fell asleep at the table, a broken sugar petal still in her hand.
In the morning, the town crowded at her window, breath clouding the glass. In the middle, where her sugar flower should have stood, a real poinsettia* had opened. Pink like her cochineal, its edges fading to cream, as if the sugar had only just begun to cool.
The old women of the square say that winter rewards those who keep trying.
Since that morning, the middle of her window stays empty. And every Christmas Eve, she looks out into the falling snow, and hopes.
*In Mexico, the poinsettia is called flor de Nochebuena, the flower of Christmas Eve. Legend tells of a poor girl with no gift to bring, who carried an armful of roadside weeds to the altar. There, they burst into scarlet bloom.
FROM THE JOURNAL
To read and to keep
AS SEEN IN
