Sure, when kids are little we have some control over how many pounds of candy they haul home from trick-or-treating. As they get older, it's not so easy to balance their desire for a mountain of neon colored confectionary junk and our desire for healthy children with all of their teeth.
Here's ten ways to reduce the mountain and still have happy trick or treaters.
1. Do science experiments with it like this family.
2. Make gingerbread houses, using graham crackers as walls and frosting as glue. Decorate liberally with candy.
3. Use it as math manipulatives. Sort like candies by color, use them to do addition problems, graph them and so on.
4. Pay them by the pound. Weigh the candy on a kitchen scale and offer them a certain price per ounce. Take the purchased loot to the office or just toss it.
5. Take them reverse trick-or-treating. Visit neighbors and bring little homemade baskets of candy. If you like, make up little paper baskets like these and fill with candy and a sweet note.
6. Make up a batch of cupcakes and use candies to decorate them. Let the kids go crazy with patterns, designs, creatures, you name it. Then deliver the cupcakes to the fire department, a local business or some other deserving folks.
7. Bake with it. Have the kids donate a big stash of it to the baking bin and agree to make weekly treats together with the stash. Here's some recipes for treats like candy bar cookies and peppermint patty brownies.
8. Trade it in. Offer to swap it out for a nifty present. Some families leave their extra loot under the bed for the candy fairy and she trades it for a gift.
9. Smash it. There are few things as satisfying to some kids as getting to pound things with a hammer. Put everybody in protective eyewear, head outside, spread some newspaper and let the kids smash their unwrapped goodies with mallets or hammers. Have them guess ahead of time how the candy will react. Will it shatter, flatten, turn to dust?
10. Turn it in to be sent to the troops. Dentists all over the metro area are participating in the Halloween Candy Buyback program. Kids drop off their extra candy and the dentists buy it back from them for $1 a pound, then send it on to troops stationed overseas. Enter your zip code here to find the nearest participating dentist and learn more about the program.
