What to Do with Leftover Halloween Candy and Wrappers

Depending on how ambitious your trick or treaters are, you may wind up with a lot more candy than you care to see them eat. Here are a few ideas for other ways to use that candy, and even the wrappers...

• Use the wrappers (vintage candies like Mary Jane's will have a particularly nice effect) to decoupage a tin or basket. Instructions via Martha Stewart.

• We found a list of great ideas for the candy itself over at Parenthood.com including freezing the candy, stuffing it in a pinata, using it to decorate cupcakes or stick in cakes, or saving it for your gingerbread house.

• Finally, some good suggestions for how to sort through and organize that candy over at Mix Mingle Glow including stashing a few pieces in your purse for those moments/meltdowns when you need a little bribe.

Comments (4)

The night of Halloween, we come back home and pour the candy out on the floor away from the dog! I scan the candy to make sure it's all safe but also keeping a keen eye for my favorites (can you say "Swedish Fish"?! YUM!) Then the kids get to eat 5-6 pcs of their favorites. We save a few more pcs, of their choice for the next day. Then I offer them $5 for the remainder of their candy.They're always thrilled and happily give up the rest of the candy without a fight. With that, I scan through, deciding what will be saved for our gingerbread house. Anything not suitable gets bagged and sent off with Daddy for the work snack room.

posted by abbygraykit on October 15th 2009 at 4:31pm
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If you can get together with other families and ban together this halloween to collect candy wrappers you can reduce a huge amount of waste and contribute to a good cause this season.

I highly recommend joining TerraCycle's Candy Brigade. Just join for free and they will send you bags and postage- all you need to do is collect the wrappers and send them back to be recycled into a myriad of products with proceeds donated to charities.

There are a few other Brigades too for other containers.

posted by indiefolklore on October 15th 2009 at 5:56pm
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Our large dog ate a large amount of Halloween candy, wrappers and all. She was ok and the crime almost went undetected. Dogs can smell the candy and will steal it if they can. Some friends had a tradition of eating some for one night and putting the rest in a tree for the candy fairy, who took it away and left a surprise gift.
My kids seemed to enjoy having and sorting it more than they liked eating it. My son packed his into his tackle box.

posted by Kate (NC) on October 16th 2009 at 1:43pm
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Pretty sure the answer to "what can you do with leftover halloween candy" is...

eat it covertly after the kids go to sleep!

posted by teacupcake on October 22nd 2009 at 1:43pm
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