Coal candy is a unique confection invented in Pottsville, Pennsylvania, by Catherine Mootz of the Mootz Candy Store sometime in the 1950s, when the region’s coal industry was thriving. It is intensely licorice-flavored, packaged in large, irregular chunks that are black and shiny like nuggets of freshly mined anthracite. It comes in boxes, in miniature miners’ buckets, and in toy train cars; it is sometimes sold with a little toy hammer that can be used to smash big pieces into bite-size fragments. Whereas the traditional Christmas code says that boys and girls who have been bad get a lump of coal in their stockings, that practice is reversed in the mining towns of Pennsylvania, where only good children get stockings full of coal candy.