Our church is entering a float in our town’s Christmas parade this weekend. It was decided to hand out candy canes attached to short piece about how the candy cane illustrates Jesus and why He came to earth. I came across such a story in my files called Candymaker’s Witness. Not remembering where this particular story came from, I decided to check its origin on Snopes.com. If you are not familiar with Snopes, it is an internet site that researches urban legends, rumour, etc., in an effort to prove or disprove them. According to Snopes.com this piece about a candymaker in Indiana inventing the candy cane to be a witness to Jesus’ birth, ministry and death is false. There appears to a possibility of some truth in parts of the story, but not as it reads in the story I have(which is the exact same one Snopes displays). You can read the article from Snopes here.
One of my pet peeves involves people who email all kinds of stories and warnings to their whole mailing list without ever checking them out. I consider it many times worse to use a story that is not true, but presented as true, to share the Gospel of Jesus Christ. How can we expect people to believe the Gospel if we mix it with untruth? We need to be so careful in what we say and how we say it so as not to cause unnecessary offense.
We are going to use a version of the candy cane witness to hand out with our candy canes, but it strictly talks about how a candy cane can remind us of what Christmas and Jesus are about. It does not say that this is what the candy cane was invented to do. As the Snopes article says, there is nothing wrong with finding and celebration symbolism where there wasn’t any before. Let’s just be sure that the message is clear and not mixed with half-truths and falsehood.
Grace and peace,
Dave
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1 comment:
Very interesting. With all those facts against this myth it's a wonder I haven't heard of it before. Well, now I have. Again, very interesting.
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