Like many people, you may find yourself in early November sitting on piles of candy you don’t think you should eat—no matter how much you desire it.
It may be that your kids have separated out the items they don’t like. Perhaps they got so much you can’t bear for them to eat it all.
It might also be that fewer ghouls and goblins than expected showed up to trick or treat at your house.
What do you do with it all?
Here are a few handy tips to save you the trouble of scanning the web for ideas on reducing the mounds of leftover Halloween candy including Mounds bars.
Tip No. 1: Send it here. Reporters eat anything. Even Dum Dums, licorice and candy corn.
Just kidding. Here are the real ideas:
• Cindy Webster, a Sacramento native now living in Lafayette, Calif., said she sends candies she doesn’t want her 3- and 6-year-old to eat to work with her husband. You can call it Share the Wealth. We call it Share the Width, as in waistlines.
• If it’s candy that won’t melt, keep some in your car. You could give it to people asking for a handout or gnaw it when you get hungry. It’s especially useful in parts of the country where you may get stuck in a snowstorm.
• Donate it to a pediatric dental office. They often buy candy back from kids. Go to halloweencandybuyback.com.
• Some parents do a home version, inventing a Candy Fairy who leaves toys or change in exchange for candy. However, a friend in Boulder, Colo., tells us that her 10-year-old parts with the candy only grudgingly.
• Freeze it and enjoy it at another time.
• Repurpose the candy for other holidays. Got a birthday coming up? Use it to stuff a pinata. Donate some to a food bank for Thanksgiving baskets. The Web site alphamom.com has a kitschy, paper-cup Advent calendar idea, that stretches Christmas expectations until early November. (We know, Target already does that.) And a few folks have suggested using it for Hannukah, too. Candy corn for playing dreidl?
• Cook with it. There are too many recipes online to mention, but our favorite suggestion was to make or buy miniature graham cracker crusts and melt candy bars in them at 350 degrees for 15 minutes or so.
No, it doesn’t reduce the amount of sweets, but it may provide a dessert option that doesn’t look like, ugh, yet another candy bar.
• Toss the candy out entirely and do crafts with the wrappers. Check out the ideas at, you guessed it, marthastewart.com or candywrappercrafts.blogspot.com. Hard candies themselves are also usable for crafts, such as gingerbread houses.
• Operation Gratitude takes candy donations for American troops. Ship candy by Dec. 5:
Operation Gratitude/California
Army National Guard
17330 Victory Blvd.
Van Nuys, CA 91406
Attn: Charlie Othold.
Details are at OperationGratitude.com.
• Of course, there is the obvious “Weird Al” Yankovic solution, from his take-off of Michael Jackson: “Just eat it!”
