Tilly and the Peppermint Stripes — Under the peppermint printroom, Tilly slid sheet after sheet across the warm table, listening to the soft shhht of fresh stickers. Read the full story →
Under the peppermint printroom, Tilly slid sheet after sheet across the warm table, listening to the soft shhht of fresh stickers. She wanted every ornament, cookie, tree, and star to lift cleanly by morning, but the plain white candy canes kept curling at the ends and gluing themselves to their neighbors. The room smelled like sugar dust and wet paper. Tilly tapped one cane with her pencil. It answered with a tiny hollow clink.
“No candy cane should sound like a teacup,” she whispered. Curiosity tugged her past the ribbon drawers, past the sleepy ink bottles, to the smallest cane on the corner of the sheet. Nobody ever checked the blank middle; it was too simple to be important. Tilly held it to the lamp, and inside the white paper curled a hidden thread of red peppermint ink, coiled like a sleeping snail.
When she warmed the cane between her hands, the thread woke and wound around the outside in bright, neat stripes. The sticky edges relaxed. One by one, every cane blushed into spirals, leaving little gaps so the other stickers could breathe. Ever since that quiet night in the peppermint printroom, candy canes have worn stripes to keep holiday sheets from holding on too tight—and if you spot the smallest curved cane, you may find where Tilly first heard that hollow clink.
