Today we celebrate those sweet like-cloud candy treats, the Cotton Candy. This day is observed annually on December 7th.
When I was growing up, I always love to have my favorite cotton candy in blue when we go to a park. The most amazing form of treatment that is cloud-like, and delicate ever invented by man. I love to watch how it is made from a machine that when it starts spinning it create a threadlike web around the entire machine after the colored sugar is poured on the middle hole of the machine. Once the cloud-like starts to build up, the person-in-charge starts to wrap around the thread-like strands on a paper stick creating a big shape of cotton candy.
Cotton candy is a spun of sugar confection resembling cotton which contains a small amount of flavoring and some food coloring. It is made by heating and liquefying the sugar, while spinning it centrifugally through minute holes, allowing the sugar to rapidly cool and resolidify into fine strands.
Cotton candies are often sold at fairs, circuses, carnivals, and festivals and they are usually served on sticks, paper cone, or in a plastic bag. It is sold all over the world. Several places claim the origin of the cotton candy, with some sources tracing it to a form of spun sugar found in Europe in the 19th century.
Machine-spun cotton candy was invented in 1897 by William Morrison, a dentist, and by John C. Wharton, a confectioner. The first cotton candy was introduced to a wide audience at the 1904 World’s Fair as a “Fairy Floss” which did a great success, selling 68,655 boxes at 25 cents which were equivalent to $6.97 in 2018.
Did you know that Tootsie Roll Industries, makes a bagged, fruit-flavored cotton candy called the Fluffy Stuff? Tootsie Roll Industries is the world’s largest cotton-candy manufacturer.
So, today, celebrate this day by eating your favorite cotton candy, just make sure to brush your teeth when you are done because that is a lot of sugar. Share on social media your favorite color using #CottonCandyDay.
1941 FDR reacts to news of Pearl Harbor bombing
On December 7, 1941, at around 1:30 p.m., President Franklin Roosevelt is conferring with advisor Harry Hopkins in his study when Navy Secretary Frank Knox bursts in and announces that Japan had attacked Pearl Harbor. The attack killed more than 2,400 naval and military personnel.
For weeks, a war with Japan had appeared likely since negotiations had deteriorated over the subject of Japan’s military forays into China and elsewhere in the Pacific during World War II. FDR and his advisors knew that an attack on the U.S. fleet at the Philippines was possible, but few suspected the naval base at Pearl Harbor would be a target.
In her account of Roosevelt and first lady Eleanor during the years of the Second World War, No Ordinary Time, historian Doris Kearns Goodwin recounts the scene at the White House on that tragic and pivotal day: Eleanor had just finished hosting a luncheon and walked into FDR’s study just as he received confirmation of the attack via telephone. While aides and secretaries scurried around the room, Eleanor overheard some of her husband’s conversation and knew that, in her words, “the final blow had fallen and we had been attacked.”
(excerpted from https://www.history.com/this-day-in-history/fdr-reacts-to-news-of-pearl-harbor-bombing)
