Humbugs are a traditional hard boiled sweet available in the United Kingdom

United Kingdom

The United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern IrelandIn the United Kingdom and Dependencies, other languages have been officially recognised as legitimate autochthonous languages under the European Charter for Regional or Minority Languages...

, Ireland

Ireland

Ireland is an island to the northwest of continental Europe. It is the third-largest island in Europe and the twentieth-largest island on Earth...

, Canada

Canada

Canada is a North American country consisting of ten provinces and three territories. Located in the northern part of the continent, it extends from the Atlantic Ocean in the east to the Pacific Ocean in the west, and northward into the Arctic Ocean...

, Australia

Australia

Australia , officially the Commonwealth of Australia, is a country in the Southern Hemisphere comprising the mainland of the Australian continent, the island of Tasmania, and numerous smaller islands in the Indian and Pacific Oceans. It is the world's sixth-largest country by total area...

 and New Zealand

New Zealand

New Zealand is an island country in the south-western Pacific Ocean comprising two main landmasses and numerous smaller islands. The country is situated some east of Australia across the Tasman Sea, and roughly south of the Pacific island nations of New Caledonia, Fiji, and Tonga...

. They are usually flavoured with peppermint

Peppermint

Peppermint is a hybrid mint, a cross between the watermint and spearmint . The plant, indigenous to Europe, is now widespread in cultivation throughout all regions of the world...

 and striped in two different colours (often brown and tan). They have a hard outside and a soft toffee centre. Humbugs are typically cylinders with rounded ends wrapped in a twist of cellophane

Cellophane

Cellophane is a thin, transparent sheet made of regenerated cellulose. Its low permeability to air, oils, greases, bacteria and water makes it useful for food packaging...

, or else pinched cylinders with a 90-degree

Degree (angle)

A degree , usually denoted by ° , is a measurement of plane angle, representing 1⁄360 of a full rotation; one degree is equivalent to π/180 radians...

 turn between one end and the other (shaped like a pyramid with rounded edges), loose in a bag. Records of humbugs exist from as early as the 1820s and they are referred to in the 1863 book Sylvia's Lovers

Sylvia's Lovers

Sylvia's Lovers is a novel written by Elizabeth Gaskell, which she called "the saddest story I ever wrote".-Plot summary:The novel begins in the 1790s in the coastal town of Monkshaven against the background of the practice of impressment during the early phases of the Napoleonic Wars...

as being a food from the North.

They are more often eaten in winter than summer. The name of the sweet is not related to the phrase "Bah, humbug

Humbug

Humbug is an old term meaning hoax or jest. While the term was first described in 1751 as student slang, its etymology is unknown. Its present meaning as an exclamation is closer to 'nonsense' or 'gibberish', while as a noun, a humbug refers to a fraud or impostor, implying an element of...

" derived from Dickens

Charles Dickens

Charles John Huffam Dickens was an English novelist, generally considered the greatest of the Victorian period. Dickens enjoyed a wider popularity and fame than had any previous author during his lifetime, and he remains popular, having been responsible for some of English literature's most iconic...

' A Christmas Carol

A Christmas Carol

A Christmas Carol is a novella by English author Charles Dickens first published by Chapman & Hall on 17 December 1843. The story tells of sour and stingy Ebenezer Scrooge's ideological, ethical, and emotional transformation after the supernatural visits of Jacob Marley and the Ghosts of...

. That expression implies a general dissatisfaction with the Christmas season. However, offering humbugs around Christmas

Christmas

Christmas or Christmas Day is an annual holiday generally celebrated on December 25 by billions of people around the world. It is a Christian feast that commemorates the birth of Jesus Christ, liturgically closing the Advent season and initiating the season of Christmastide, which lasts twelve days...

 time is now seen by some as humorous or ironic, and was featured in an episode of Blackadder

Blackadder's Christmas Carol

Blackadder's Christmas Carol is a one-off episode of Blackadder, a parody of Charles Dickens' A Christmas Carol. It is set between Blackadder the Third and Blackadder Goes Forth , and is narrated by Hugh Laurie...

in this manner.

Manufacture

A mixture of sugar, glycerine, colour and flavouring is heated to 145°C. This is then poured out and stretched and folded many times. The stripes originate from a smaller piece of coloured mixture which is folded in to the main mixture. The mixture is finally rolled in to a long, thin cylinder and sliced into segments.

Bulls-eyes

A similar sweet is "bulls-eye" which has black and white stripes like a humbug but is spherical like an aniseed ball

Aniseed ball

Aniseed balls are a type of hard round sweet sold in the UK, New Zealand and Australia. They are shiny and dark brownish red, and hard like Gobstoppers, but generally only 1cm across. They are generally sold by weight- traditionally, for example, they were sold by quarter pound...

. These are peppermint flavoured and are also known as bullets in the UK as they are similar in size to smoothbore

Smoothbore

A smoothbore weapon is one which has a barrel without rifling. Smoothbores range from handheld firearms to powerful tank guns and large artillery mortars.-History of firearms and rifling:...

 musket balls.