The Sugar Sprite and Other Halloween Candy Alternatives

Here are a few alternatives to the sugar high around this time of year

from this site

1. You could go to a celebration that isn’t centered around candy. This might mean having your own Halloween party with lots of yummy nutritious treats. Or you could find a local event to attend. A third option would be to opt out of the Halloween theme altogether and have a harvest or All Saints Day party.
2. You could do limited trick-or-treating: once around the block, or a “trunk-or-treat” event that’s contained to a parking lot, thus limiting how much candy gets brought home.
3. You could do trick-or-treating as usual and pool the candy in a “treat jar,” doling out pieces for special occasions. That stuff does not not have an expiration date, trust me.
4. You can eat a little bit of candy and use the rest for candy experiments. I actually tend to sort out the cheap “made in China” candy for this purpose, since I am concerned about recalls and testing of this sort of candy in past years.
5. You could also sort and save candy for baking. Chocolate bars can replace chocolate chips, M&Ms for cookies, etc.

Personally, I do a combination of these. I let my children each pick out 10 pieces of their very favorite candy. That’s just for them. Then I go through and pull out what I want for candy experiments. The stuff that can be used for baking gets sorted out next and the rest goes in our treat jar.

The Sugar Sprite 
As the weather becomes colder, the Sugar Sprite requires more sugar to
keep warm than she needs in the summer months. So, on Halloween, children
dress up in costumes and go to their friends’ and neighbors’ houses to
collect candy for the needy sprite. Although they do sample some candy along the
way while walking around in the cold night air, Sugar Sprite children place
their candy at the foot of their beds (or outside the front door, etc.)
before going to sleep. During the night, the friendly Sugar Sprite comes in, takes
the candy and leaves a gift of thanks. The Sugar Sprite knows what all
children like, but sometimes the children write letters or make pictures for
the sprite about a week before Halloween so she doesn’t get confused (she
has to visit a lot of children to collect enough sugar for the coming winter!)

It is perfectly acceptable to say, "Look, we don’t need all that candy. It’s not healthy. This is what we’re doing instead.”