Halloween Hacks, a Few Last Words

First, a footnote to the previous post, where we mentioned the desirability of making good use of pumpkins. “Zero-Waste Chef” Anne Marie Bonneau dives deeply into the topic of pumpkins, which generate an estimated 1.3 billion pounds of organic waste per year, and do not belong in landfills because there, they turn into methane gas and contribute to climate disaster.

Since they are food, the best course would be to eat them, and the chef provides recipes. But by the time Halloween is over, jack-o-lanterns are all withered and moldy, so that’s no good. But at least compost the darn things, so they can turn into healthy soil, not sickening gas! And furthermore — save the seeds. Bonneau writes,

Whether you eat pumpkins or carve jack-o-lanterns, save the seeds to roast. My kids always loved this crunchy fall treat. You can roast all different kinds of squash seeds. The small seeds of delicata squash — yellow-orange, cylindrical-shaped squash with green stripes — become crunchy quite quickly when roasted in a bit of olive oil.

There are good reasons to switch over to non-food treats for Halloween. One is that some innocent child might be accidentally poisoned. Some allergies only cause a rash or sniffles, but a peanut allergy can be a serious proposition. The trouble is, some people just don’t understand the danger. Manufacturers are not always meticulous about labeling, and even nutless candy made in the same facility as the nutty kind can be dangerous. We all need a reminder that obesity avoidance is not the only factor behind choosing to give out non-food Halloween treats.

Still, if you are simply interested in distributing treats that don’t contribute to obesity, the market provides a bounty of yogurt raisins, low-sugar mini granola bars, craisins, individually packaged dried fruit, fruit leather, fruit or veggie pouches, juice boxes, honey sticks, trail mix, and more.

Kids and parents can even make little collectors’ items to distribute, like pipe-cleaner spiders. If you have never made pumpkins from “pool noodles,” maybe now is the time to start. This page offers plenty of ideas from elementary school teachers, such as:

Have you seen those little bottles of aromatherapy for kids, promising to give them sweet dreams or happy thoughts? Make your own concoction for your students. Then put the liquid in spray bottles and slap on a label. We suggest making a “zombie spray” to keep zombies away, but let your imagination be your guide.

Of course, there are plenty of commercial products you can buy for trick-or-treat giving, for instance: rings that look like eyeballs; temporary tattoos (even glow in dark); vampire teeth; little bats; glow stick necklaces; friendship bracelets; bubble soap; fake mustaches; and Halloween-decorated slinkies, bouncy-balls, stickers, kazoos, drinking straws, miniature flashlights, band-aids, and much more. Tip: Buy these in the after-Halloween sales, to save for next year.

Childhood Obesity News has presented some of the crispiest, juiciest Halloween Hacks around. Anyone who progresses in a straight backward line through these posts will find inspiration. Anyone who feeds “Halloween” into the search box will be astounded.

Your responses and feedback are welcome!

Source: “How to Keep 1.3 Billion Pounds of Pumpkin Out of Landfill,” Substack.com, 10/26/21
Source: “How to Make Pipe Cleaner Spiders,” Blogspot.com, 10/3/2011
Source: “30 Sugar-Free Treats for Halloween,” WeAreTeachers.com, 10/11/18
Image by garlandcanon/CC BY-SA 2.0

Halloween Fallout

So there lies the sugary harvest and ideally, some time in the previous week, kids and their caregivers have already agreed on what will be done with it. Somebody needs to decide what will happen to the loot and, hopefully, parents and children were able to collaborate in setting a limit. As an added bonus, if you can persuade them to design and observe boundaries here, that willingness could carry over into other areas of life. Elicit a child’s cooperation in making a plan, and you’re halfway to success.

If more than one child is involved, and they plan to swap back and forth, it doesn’t need to happen the minute they return from trick-or-treating. Prolong the holiday spirit by putting off the barter session until the next day. Give the traders time to settle down and think clearly about the deals they hope to make. Even after all the hoopla of getting the goods, and making shrewd bargains with each other, they might be willing to at least relinquish the brands they don’t care for, or even all of it. A kid can surprise you, and a smart adult never loses sight of that fact.

Variations on a theme​

​Maybe the family has set up some kind of rationing mechanism, so the sweets will not all be gobbled down at once. The take might be divided into four piles, with three piles released into parental custody, to be returned at one-week intervals. Or, the kids could keep half, and let a parent take the rest to share at work. Or the majority of the sweets could be reserved for day-by-day release in school lunch bags.

Some candies are candidates to be frozen for later use. People have been known to bake cupcakes with pieces of candy in their middles. At least one family has reported saving the Halloween treats to make Advent calendars. Some candies are even visually appropriate to reserve for decorating a gingerbread house at Christmas. Maybe you’ve got the Switch Witch thing going on, and each child’s hoard will be swapped for a toy or other item. ​ Take the donation route?

If some or all of the swag is to be given away, recipients may include homeless shelters, food pantries, senior centers, nursing homes, hospices, and veterans’ organizations. Some dentists participate in a program where they buy surplus candy from young Americans and send it to deployed troops overseas.

But why would any kid in their right mind go along with any of this? Who knows? The only certainty is that they can occasionally surprise you. Making a plan ahead of time will probably work out better than leaving it until the gruesome pile of calories is actually sitting there, staring your child in the face. In the concluding paragraph, Dr. David Ludwig speaks on the morality of simply disposing of the Halloween haul:

After your child has had one or two candies from their Trick-or-Treat booty, throw out the rest (don’t give it away and foist the problem on other kids). Use the occasion as an opportunity to teach your kids a critical message: health comes first… Yes, it’s important to respect food, and not be wasteful, especially when some people don’t have enough to eat. But typical Halloween candy isn’t food, it’s junk.

Your responses and feedback are welcome!

Source: “What is the Halloween Candy Buyback?,” HalloweenCandyBuyback.com, undated
Source: “Counterpoint: It’s Not Just OK To Throw Out Halloween Candy, It’s Smart,” Wbur.org, 11/02/16
Image “two jacks” by William Warby/CC BY 2.0

Halloween — What’s the Plan, Stan?

For a conscientious parent, the Halloween goals are to minimize the amount of junk the kids collect, how much they hold onto, and how much of it they ultimately consume.

If a family traditionally participates in the trick-or-treat ritual by passing out candy, a parent can introduce the concept of change by asking for ideas about whether something else could be distributed instead. It might be an opportunity to mention the horrible ingredients that are in some alleged treats, and just lightly touch on the very unfortunate results hidden in an overdose of sugar, especially if repeated often throughout a young life.

Start with the collecting part, and come to an agreement on at least one boundary, which could be spatial or temporal. The time limit could be 30 minutes or an hour. Parents and children can conspire beforehand to map out the most promising route, in terms of reward per time spent, and then stick to it. If your housing situation is fairly stable, it might be fun to keep note of what was distributed, at which addresses, and then later compare next year’s statistics. Why? Because keeping track of hard facts and learning to draw conclusions from them are valuable life skills.

Be best

Can kids be coaxed into setting arbitrary rules that increase the challenge? For instance, just to make things interesting, maybe they can only go to a house where someone is already on the porch. Or only to participating houses where nobody is on the porch at the moment. Or limit themselves to even-numbered addresses, or odd-numbered ones. It doesn’t really matter, as long as the rule originates with the kids, and will ultimately advance the parents’ agenda: to bring home less sugar at the end.

It seems to be fairly common for parents to decree “No eating while traipsing from door to door.” Be sure to lay the groundwork for this by making a nutritious dinner first. Then, during the collection process, anticipation makes even the best rewards richer. Furthermore, if kids plan to swap with each other afterward, it would be silly to gobble down anything that might be traded for an even better treat, if only they had waited. Also, whether or not parents believe that evil neighbors might poison children, it makes sense for them to give everything a once-over before anybody indulges.

The greater purpose here is to put some kind of a lid on the collection of loot, and to set a precedent. If parent and child can agree ahead of time on a well-defined trip, and both emerge feeling like winners, it sets a useful example for future compromise on other matters.

Your responses and feedback are welcome!

Image by vtgard/CC BY 2.0

Switch Witch Lore

What to do with the trick-or-treat harvest? As the alternative to a candy orgy, one possibility is to bring in a mythological character known as the Switch Witch, who kindly carries away the Halloween swag on her broomstick. That sounds awkward, but hey, Santa makes his rounds in a chariot mounted on a pair of skis and pulled by a few puny flying deer. (Needless to say, almost all imaginary beings travel by air.)

In another way, the Switch Witch is different from Santa, because, with her, there are no freebies. Like the Tooth Fairy, she will take something away — in this case, the Halloween swag — either all of it, or a percentage agreed upon in advance of the date, between the children and the parents. “The more they give the Switch Witch, the better their toy will be,” writes Genevieve Howland, who goes on to flesh out the narrative:

This only happens once every year, because the switch witch eats all of the little boys and girls’ candy over the course of the whole year. Then, just as she starts to run out of candy, it’s Halloween time again — time for another visit from the Switch Witch.

The Switch Witch has been around for a while, swapping sweets for gifts, and incidentally, for a childhood with fewer dentist visits than might otherwise have been needed. (How many dentist visits she herself requires, and how she keeps her figure, are not known.) Of course, we don’t want children to be genuinely terrified, so some parents call her by other names instead, like the Candy Fairy, Pumpkin Fairy, or Halloween Fairy.

An ambitious and forward-looking parent might sort the swapped candy and keep items that will look good later, on a Christmas gingerbread house. In Howland’s comment section, one parent particularly advised against keeping any neon-colored candy, which apparently contains even more than the average amount of ugly ingredients. One mom wrote,

I have mine leave their candy in their buckets on the front porch before bed. The toys, books, socks, juice, or whatever I put in them is there in their bucket the next morning.

Many parents support the custom because they are not willing to deprive their kids of the trick-or-treat fun. Some maintain the facade by buying surprise gifts, while others simply acknowledge there is no witch, and take the kids shopping to choose their own gifts.

Lisa Steinke, who also has written about the Switch Witch, quoted a fan named Barbara, who said,

I have never thought it particularly healthy to encourage gluttony by bringing home pillow cases and bags overflowing with candy! With my kids, it always seemed as if the more they got, the more they wanted…

Steinke suggests first telling children about the Switch Witch, then asking them to decide what proportion of their Halloween Night collection they are willing to give up. Or the parent simply decrees the age rule: They get to keep one piece of candy for every year old they are. Steinke writes,

Have your child write a note to the Switch Witch asking for the toy(s) she wants. After the trick-or-treating is over, help your child prepare the candy for the Switch Witch. After your child goes to sleep, exchange the candy for the toy(s).
Tip: Throw it out immediately so your child doesn’t find it and so you don’t eat it!

Another thing the mythical witch might do is sell her haul of candy to a local dentist, who sends it to active-duty military personnel stationed overseas.

Your responses and feedback are welcome!

Source: “The Switch Witch (Save Your Kids From Halloween Candy Madness),” MamaNatural.com, 12/05/19
Source: “Switch Witch: Good or bad idea?,” SheKnows.com, 10/19/12
Image by Kana Natsuno/CC BY 2.0

Halloween Treats for Hosts and Guests

Some Halloween edibles are very fun to make with kids, but not suitable for giving out as trick-or-treat items. They need to be presented on plates, kept right-side-up, and prevented from falling apart. Such items are appropriate for family meals, for when company comes over, and for taking along to a gathering that you are invited to in someone else’s home, or even for a work-related event.

A number of scary desserts can be made with fruits. Crazy Eyes and Orange & Green Meanies are two of the possibilities. Even if some of the components (like chocolate chips) are not exactly low-calorie, with a little imagination they can be replaced by healthier alternatives. Writer Christine Struble says,

Interested grownups can find instructions for making miniature pumpkins from Mandarin oranges and celery sticks, or carving faces into miniature wax-coated cheeses. Other possibilities are apple nachos and banana ghosts.

As well as being low on carbohydrates, some creations are gluten-free, paleo, and even adaptable to be totally vegan. This page steers you to recipes for such treats as Chocolate Peanut Butter Spider Cookies, Paleo Witch Finger Cookies, Stuffed Jack-o-Lanterns, Sugar-Free Yummy Gummy Candy, and Halloween Deviled Eggs. Here, one example is described:

Low Carb Halloween Chips – Using fun Halloween cookie cutters, and your favourite low carb tortilla shells, you can quickly and easily create a heaping bowl full of crispy seasoned chips that are extremely tasty and perfect for dipping. This recipe shows you how to make them with a sweet cinnamon seasoning, but you can always change it up and use all kinds of low carb seasonings for a variety of different flavours.

Although not suitable for trick-or-treat handouts, these Halloween-themed food creations from another page can be put together at home from ingredients like raisins, fresh fruit, pretzel sticks, etc. Very artistic and creative! The suggestions include things that can be made from the interior of a pumpkin, rather than throwing it away.

Why is this important? After every Halloween, American landfills receive 1.3 billion pounds of pumpkin. The waste is not only of potential food, but of the water, labor, energy, land, and capital devoted to growing those fruits (classified as such because anything that begins as a flower is technically a fruit). Digging deeper, we find the horrifying reason why dumping organic waste in landfills is a bad idea: because it exacerbates climate change:

According to the U.S Environmental Protection Agency, in the United States, food is the single largest category of material placed in municipal landfills, where it emits methane, a powerful greenhouse gas. Municipal solid waste landfills are the third-largest source of human-related methane emissions in the United States, accounting for approximately 14.1 percent of these emissions in 2017.

Now, that’s scary!

Your responses and feedback are welcome!

Source: “Healthy Halloween recipes are sweeter than all that Halloween candy,” FoodSided.com, 10/09/21
Source: “Sugar Free (and Low Carb) Halloween Treats,” TheLowCarbGrocery.com, undated
Source: “52 Healthy Halloween Treats for Kids,” LivingWellMom.com, undated
Source: “Why should we care about food waste?,” USDA.gov, undated
Image by Selena N. B. H./CC BY 2.0

Halloween Hacks

Because individuals and families vary greatly, nothing works for everybody, but it is definitely worth trying some ideas to ameliorate the holiday stress. It would be hard to blame a parent for wishing that Halloween simply didn’t exist. Actually in some circumstances, like with an only child, it might be possible to get away with that. Older siblings will definitely blow the whistle, spill the beans, and let the cat out of the bag. But with any luck, grownups can prevent a singleton from finding out about trick-or-treat at a precocious age, and win a grace period of a year or two. Can a parent be forgiven for keeping a child ignorant? In this particular case, yes.

Do not buy early. Or late.

How often do grownups stock up early on trick-or-treat candy, then eat it all, and have to replace it as the scary day approaches? We’ll never tell — but don’t be one of them. And don’t go grocery shopping too soon after the fall sugarfest, either, so you don’t even have to see the bins of leftover orange sugar bombs at tempting bargain prices. The only possible reason for shopping right after Halloween is if your child has agreed to forfeit their trick-or-treat stash for a favorite healthful, or at least less destructive, food.

Go public

COVID-19 has put a dent in traditional spooky celebrations, but not much of a dent as some of us would like. Innovative teachers, parents, and youth leaders have figured out alternative activities that still manage to spread around plenty of high-fructose corn syrup-based items. If parents belong to an organization that hosts some kind of Halloween event, they can bring the matter up in the planning stages and try to influence the group. Find out what the plan is, at preschool, daycare, public school, Sunday school, or wherever else your child spends time offsite — and if it involves sweet treats, try to influence that plan. Be sure to warn relatives and child-care people that you are aiming for a candyless holiday.

Influence trick-or-treat methodology

Conspire with other parents in your neighborhood, building, or social circle to create a sugar-free party on the appropriate night, or to switch over to non-food treats. In certain situations, parents can be forgiven for resorting to bribery. For example: Is there a scary movie they want to see, but that hasn’t turned up on your streaming service? Make a special effort to get hold of it, on condition that trick-or-treat time will be shortened (or maybe even eliminated.)

Reconfigure Halloween

To shorten or eliminate trick-or-treat time, plan an extensive photo session — especially if you and your kids have made your own brilliant, innovative costumes or masks. If you decorated your yard, porch, hallway, or living room, don’t forget to document those accomplishments.

Tell ghost stories. With preparation beforehand, you can use this time to play an elaborate, spooky game like the one immortalized by the writer Ray Bradbury in “The October Game.” Or read that story aloud, or turn off the lights and listen to it, which takes less than 20 minutes, but it’s a bit rough for younger kids (unless they just don’t get it). Of course, any halfway ambitious child will start planning now, to get a group together and actually play the game, next year.

Take a big swing

Try something wildly different, like starting a new tradition. Invest an hour of family time into watching “How the Chocolate Industry Still Profits From Child Labor.” In the countries where cacao is grown, the line between child labor and child slavery is quite tenuous. Many American young people are socially conscious to a surprising degree, and some possess the temperament or the mental sophistication to grapple with a lot of nuance. They might decide to skip the candy, or collect it and sell it to other kids, in order to donate money to some organization that works to end the exploitation of children.

Your responses and feedback are welcome!

Image by Bennilover/CC BY-ND 2.0

Obesity Festivals — Same Stuff, Different Day

The sad reality is that most holiday treats are composed of the same ingredients, rendered into different shapes and dyed with holiday-specific colors. Sure, some of the ingredients are actual food — like wheat, soy, milk, eggs, peanuts, and sesame, all of which can cause adverse reactions in some segments of the public. Then there are ingredients that, while strictly speaking, are edible, are not food in any sense of the word. A type of artificial vanilla flavoring extracted from wood comes to mind, along with another that is derived from oil. Apparently, there are growth hormones in chocolate that kids would be much better off without.

The biggest culprit of all, sugar, is of course associated with not only obesity but diabetes. In a lot of candy, the sweetness comes from sugar beets, which are specifically bred to be compatible with the herbicide Roundup, which is right up there on the list of suspected carcinogens. Then, there are corn syrup, hydrogenated palm kernel oil, and soybean oil.

One variety of artificial vanilla flavors is derived from oil. Another kind comes from wood. Also found in sweets is coal tar, a substance whose components have not even been fully identified. The food dye known as Yellow #2 has been linked to malfunctions of the nervous system that resemble Attention Deficit Hyperactivity Disorder and lead to learning disabilities and even violent behavior.

The sinister roll call includes lab-created potions, monoglycerides, TBHQ, PGPR, BHT, and several other alphabetical mystery substances. A preservative called tertiary butylhydroquinone is suspected of causing asthma, allergies, and dermatitis. Holiday candy might contain trace amounts of carcinogens like mercury, lead, and arsenic. An imposing variety of food additives and environmental toxins cause adverse reactions, including cancer, in people’s bodies, and plenty of them are also linked to obesity in complicated ways.

Even “natural flavors” are suspect, as they can include animal secretions, crushed insects, and other natural ingredients (Of course, it could be argued that mercury, lead and arsenic are also natural.)

When the American Dental Association did a Halloween Consumer Study, they learned that nine out of 10 kids would still like Halloween if the candy aspect were muted and the opportunities for other types of fun were increased. Dr. Pretlow’s inquiries have established that the two parts of Halloween that kids dig the most are dressing up, and the trick-or-treat process itself, not even necessarily the candy that accrues from it.

Many alternative thinkers suggest that, rather than trying to pinpoint all the holiday edibles that potentially cause harm, the celebrators of Halloween might prefer to concentrate on little gifties like plastic tarantulas, Halloween pencils, temporary tattoos, stickers, glow-in-the-dark items, pinwheels, rubber balls, and little jars of bubble-blowing soap. As a treat, we have suggested taking a couple of quarters and wrapping them in orange tissue paper tied with black ribbon.

But this gift-wrapping idea, and many of our other suggestions for celebrating the October holiday, are all so time-consuming! On the other hand, what little kids value the most is face time with a parent, whether bundling up quarters for distribution, dressing up the family dog, or whatever else might focus the parent’s attention on doing something with the child. And that’s not nothing.

Here is a fictitious peek at what could happen: “My Halloween, by Curly: a Suggestive Fiction.” Also, for more in-depth coverage, consult our “Halloween Roundup, Continued.”

Your responses and feedback are welcome!

Image by istolethetv/CC BY 2.0