What Do We Do with All This Candy?
Halloween is so fun! A child’s dream: free candy at every door!
But then what? What do we do with All This Candy?
Ideas Families Have Tried:
1. Explain about Candy.
When Halloween approaches each year, I try to take the time to talk to my children about sugar. Drawing from my biochemistry class, I diagram a sugar molecule, which is a hexagon with six tails. I explain to my kids how each sugar molecule grabs six other molecules and requires that many to digest itself. If you are not careful, I warn the kids, sugar will rob your body of the good nutrients it needs. In effect, your body has to fight the sugar so it can’t fight the sickness germs.
So if you are smart, I tell them, you will eat only a little bit of candy after a good meal, when there are plenty of good molecules to help your body digest it. With this said, the kids understand why I limit their candy. The message is “I love you, and I don’t want you to get sick” rather than “I want to control your candy!”
More recently, I learned that in a P.E.T. scan that looks for cancer inside you, the doctors feed you sugar water. Why? Because it goes straight to the cancer cells! It feeds the cancer! Another reason to limit sugar!! And to explain to the kids why!
2. Sort it.
In an effort to not eat too much candy, our family fills up our Halloween evening. We attend two get-togethers in the neighborhood and do just a small amount of trick-or-treating in between the two. Then, we all get in the car to go to Grandmother’s house. There, after we show Grandmother our costumes, the kids dump out their candy for her to see and for everyone to sort. “Look, I got four Starbursts!” “I’ll trade you for two suckers!” It’s everyone’s favorite part of the evening, to spread it out and sort it. The ones who haven’t had enough, can do a little more trick-or-treating in her immediate neighborhood, but by then, everyone is usually ready to head for home. The bags of candy goes on top of the fridge and don’t come down until after dinner each night, to sort some more!
Once the novelty has worn off, I can gradually and carefully “file” the candy away in the “circular file.” (the garbage can)
3. Let them manage it wisely.
I tell my kids that they can keep and handle their own candy, IF they manage it well. But if not, then I will manage it. I spell out what managing it well means: not getting into it until after a good dinner! It’s a good exercise in self-control! I watch carefully and if I see wrappers or evidence of mismanagement, I take over the candy, place it out of reach, and supervise it myself.
My Favorite Idea:
4. Save it!
We like to save our Halloween candy. The plan is to make Graham Cracker candy houses later on, on New Year’s Eve to be exact (while we are waiting for midnight). The idea is that the more candy you save, the more creative you can be when making your candy house.
Each piece of candy is examined to figure out what it can be on a candy house: Christmas lights, windows, steps, or a plethora of creative things! “I can’t eat this,” they will say, “I’m saving it for something special on my candy house.” And they don’t always plan houses! There is lots of room for building creative structures—cars, airplanes, forts, even an Eiffel Tower!
New Year’s Eve, we cover a piece of cardboard with aluminum foil for a base, and begin our creations. We pair a younger child with an older person to do the building, When the structures are made and the candy is “glued” on (with frosting), the extra candy can be discreetly thrown out! The prized houses are photographed and admired for a couple of days and then given away sometimes, or gradually eaten a bit and the rest thrown away.
My daughter’s family was successful, one year, in letting each of her children eat a few pieces of candy Halloween night, then pooling all the candy together in a single bucket to save for their candy houses. It worked out well. That year, the pool of candy was brought out to decorate houses, and then the rest thrown out. The next year, however, the consensus was that each child wanted to keep his own bag. So, this time she labeled bags and saved them on top of the fridge.
5. Count it
My brother’s family counts their candy. In fact, each year, they try to break their old record of how many pieces they can collect. A family of many children of all ages, they can collect quite a bit. Dad is probably the most enthusiastic about this tradition, and roots them on to see if they can break the standing record. But wonderfully, the kids have learned not to be selfish about their own candy. They come home and dump it out altogether, then have a great time sorting and grouping and counting all that candy. At first, tears were shed about this practice of pooling it all, but then it became routine, and all are fine with it. The candy goes in food storage buckets and is hidden. Only Daddy knows where it is! A little bit comes out at a time, to go in the children’s lunches. Each child can pick one chocolate and one or two other pieces to put in his own lunch.
6. Share it!
One year when we asked our children what ideas they had for Halloween night (wanting to limit so much candy from too much trick-or-treating), our 11-year old son came up with idea of sharing some of the candy at the Nursing home. A call to the Nursing home got us permission to give each resident only one piece of candy. When we arrived, the residents were delighted to see the children in their costumes. The youngest kids were the very best at gladly passing out their candy, sharing it generously. As the family approached one bedroom door far in the back of the facility, there lay a lady all dressed up from head to toe in a witch costume, lying flat in bed. No one was there with her and it appeared that she couldn’t move by herself nor talk. On her nightstand sat a bowl of treats. We wished her a Happy Halloween and complemented her for such a neat costume. After we left her piece of candy and filed out, we wondered, what if no one had come to see her that night? We were so grateful to have shared Halloween with this grandma.
7. Buy it from the Kids.
My friend’s family buys the candy from the kids. Five dollars to spend is a great price to pay to have all of it gone! The kids love that much money–better than a bag of candy! And that way, the candy gets dumped into the garbage, and there is no more worry about sugar or cavities or “the gimme’s”!
8. Pick an Alternative to Trick or Treating
Our neighbor’s family has chosen not to do Halloween. The mom had been a dental assistant before she was married and was not big on sugar. She didn’t like the “give me treats” selfishness. One time they talked to their kids about every holiday and Why we celebrated it. When they came to Halloween, “well it was easy for them to see we didn’t need to be celebrating it!” Oh, they didn’t forbid their children from dressing up for school or for the neighborhood get-together. And they still dressed up for Grandma’s get-together with the cousins the Sunday before. But on the actual night of Halloween, the family would plan something else fun. When their children were all at home, they planned a trip to an amusement park at that time of year. They were glad to miss the school parties with all the candy, as well as the evening. They found the amusement parks fairly empty, and had such a good time together. Later on, they would plan to turn off all the lights at home, and all go out to dinner, then miniature golfing or bowling or to see a play. One year, they took a trip to explore the southern part of their state.
How do you manage Halloween Candy? Share your ideas by commenting below.