A Paleo Halloween?

A Paleo Halloween requires a little creativity and advanced planning, but it is indeed possible to enjoy the festivities without eating a year's worth of high fructose corn syrup in one night.  This year Sisi wants to be a dinosaur and trick-or-treat with her gal pals down the street.  I'm already busy making her semi-homemade costume.  It's lime green with yellow spikes and she's going to look ridiculously cute in it.

In past years, Sisi wasn't all that aware of candy and it was easy to take away the bad stuff and give her some frozen bananas or homemade cookies instead.  This year, she knows what candy is, and she is begging me to let her try a lollipop for the first time. Here are some ideas to make Halloween more paleo-friendly:

1.  Do a Halloween basket:  Let the kids trick-or-treat all they want, but at the end of the night, have a special Halloween gift basket ready and make them hand over the crap in exchange.  Some things I will be putting in Sisi's Halloween gift basket this year:

• stickers 
• micro machines or dinosaur toys 
• dinosaur book
• homemade cookies
• stuffed animal 
• homemade turtle candies (using super dark chocolate, homemade coconut sugar caramel, and raw nuts.) 
• Trader Joe's honey peppermint patties (these are very sweet so I will be regulating her intake, but they are as healthy as store bought candies get as they are made with only dark chocolate, honey and peppermint oil.) 
• organic lollipop (trying to find one without sugar but it's challenging!)
• organic fruit snacks/fruit leathers/raisins
• 85% dark chocolate bar 

As long as it's personalized and wrapped up all pretty, I can't imagine any kid being too bummed about trading in the crap candy for the Halloween basket!  It's still got sugar and fructose, but whatever.  At least it's not pop rocks and pixie sticks.  

2.  Do a Halloween Store: Instead of putting the items above in a gift basket, you could easily set up a Halloween store with price tags that say "1 candy" "2 candies" etc, and have the kids use their trick-or-treat candy as barter.  

3.  Take it to the dentist: I've heard of dentists buying Halloween candy by the pound and giving money in exchange.  Pretty cool deal.  Do you think the dentists and assistants chow down on it after hours?  Probably :)

4.  Halloween Fairy:  My chiropractor thought of this one.  She has her kids leave their candy sacks by the front door, and when they wake up in the morning, the Halloween fairy has magically taken them away and left something awesome, like legos or cowboy boots.  This is great for parents who want to avoid all sweets, even "paleo friendlier" ones.   

5.  What to hand out?  Not only do I want to limit Sisi's candy intake, but I can't in good conscience give out crap candy to the neighbor kids. Not everyone feels this strongly, but I just can't pass out fun sized diabetes and cavities.  I just can't.  So Joe thought of a genius idea- let's pass out quarters!  What little kid doesn't love money?  We don't get a lot of trick-or-treaters, so it won't break the bank or anything.  We're also going to pass out mini water bottles for the parents and glow stick necklaces for the really little kids who will just swallow quarters.  Other ideas of things to pass out are the mini Lara Bars, trail mix, fruit snacks, bouncy balls, stickers, balloons, etc.