If you make healthy Halloween treats for kids well, they will love them and not screw their noses up. Here are some treat ideas for Halloween that are low on sugar yet still a lot of fun.
Healthy Foods to Substitute for Traditional Halloween Sweets
Make Your Own Sinister Snacks
Make sinister snacks because kids love gross things. Use cookie cutters to design homemade cookies in shapes like ghosts, bats, spiders and cats.
Bake gingerbread zombies with missing limbs. You can adjust the conventional recipes to lower the sugar and substitute whole grain flour for half the white flour.
Halloween Cookie Cutters 10 Piece Set, made from stainless steel. Easily create your spooky biscuits.
For convenience, you may wish to try Little Bakers. They have a Spiderweb Cookies Kit available in their shop with everything you need to make delicious vanilla cookies.
The kit includes flour, sugar, fondant, vanilla extract, icing pen and cookie cutter.
Kids will also love to eat fruit and vegetables if you prepare them the right way by making them look appealing. Peel grapes so that they look like eyeballs. Make a skeleton shape out of carrot sticks and sliced vegetables.
Buy Sugar-Free Sweets and Gum
If you want to cut down on your children’s sugar intake, try sugar-free or organic brands. Check the labels for the sugar content and any other ingredients that you want to avoid.
Sugar-free chewing gum is good at helping to keep dental plaque from forming on teeth. Get the kids to chew it after eating sweets because it stimulates saliva and can help fight tooth decay.
Fruittella Halloween Sweets – Fruit Gums Pouch Sugar-Free Multipack 90g
Hand Out Healthier Foods
There are lots of nutritious foods you can hand out for trick or treating. Focus on sturdy fruits and vegetables like baby carrots, raisins, apples, oranges, or bananas. Try pre-packaged cheese sticks or make your own packets of nuts.
- Watch out for cereal bars that may have as much sugar and fat as sweets and chocolate.
- Create your own trail mix with granola, nuts, and dried fruit.
- Older children may even like seaweed or unsalted soy nuts.
Serve Hot Chocolate or Juice
Water is the best way to quench your kid’s thirst, however, controlled portions of other drinks can also be a reasonable choice. Try small servings of hot chocolate as this is a great warming drink when the weather is cold.
Individual juice boxes with straws are good for providing hydration with vitamins and will keep the sugar from sticking to children’s teeth.
Other Healthy Halloween Festivities and Ideas
Consider Alternatives to Trick or Treating
More and more parents are choosing healthy and safe alternatives to trick or treating. These are some party ideas that switch the focus away from the sweets.
Have a Costume Parade
Dressing up is a huge part of Halloween. Let the kids show off their costumes. Dream up creative categories so that everyone gets a prize. You could honour the best princess costume based on a movie and the princess with the prettiest shoes.
Tell Scary Stories
Halloween is supposed to be creepy. Turn a room into a dungeon or make your garden look like a cemetery. Practice some ghost stories or encourage the group to make up their own as they go along. Plant appropriate sound effects and props to enhance the scary parts.
Indulge Your Creative Side
There are all kinds of Halloween crafts you can enjoy with your kids. Get free ideas at the library or online. You can decorate a pumpkin, make scarecrows or do some face painting.
Hand Out Non-Food Treats
Whether you trick or treat or throw a party, you can hand out treats and favours other than sweets. Give children stickers, temporary tattoos, coins, pencil toppers or small novelty toys.
Halloween toothbrushes will come in especially handy this time of year. Just make sure there are no choking hazards for very young kids.
Treat your children to one of our Pumpkin notebooks, to write and doodle in. Or buy them a spooky book to read.
The House in the Woods (The Ghost Hunter Chronicles, 1) by Yvette Fielding.
There are tons of healthy alternatives to Halloween sweets and chocolate that will keep your kids happy and your dental bills down. Make this Halloween good and scary for you and your family.
