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Peep this! Christmas City cooks up Easter’s favorite chick confection

Meredith Cummings
4 min readMar 30, 2024

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One of the most iconic Easter candies comes from Christmas City.

Living among this holiday dissonance is quirky, fun, delightful and strange.

My sweet town of Bethlehem looks like a Hallmark movie set. People here really love Christmas. So. Much. Some businesses keep Christmas trees up year round.

That’s why it floored me when I moved here and learned that Peeps are made right down the street.

What tipped me off was my first Peeps Mobile sighting — a yellow VW bug with giant, yellow Peep on top — tooling around town.

“That’d odd,” I thought. But it’s still Bethlehem. As in, “Oh Little Town Of …”

Peeps — the candy that made it to my Easter basket as a child, in my Alabama Methodist home — come from Christmas City, marrying the two biggest Christian holidays.

Surely Jesus would love Peeps.

A Wall Street Journal article in February talked about visiting a place not at the “best time,” and I can think of no better time to visit Bethlehem than at Easter when the normal tourist season has…

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Meredith Cummings
Meredith Cummings

Written by Meredith Cummings

Muppety. Freelance journalist, Teaching Assistant Journalism Professor at Lehigh University, Essayist, Book reviewer

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