Allergy Free Treats

My daughter and husband have pretty serious food allergies to milk and chocolate.  For this reason, I've always given out allergy free treats for Halloween.  (Non-Food treats)

source: http://preview.tinyurl.com/p4t8gcs

Our house has always been the "interesting" house.  While I never went so far as to hand out toothbrushes and toothpaste, (I left that to the dentist who lives next door), or free passes to the gym (The personal trainer down the street), I have always handed out something a little bit different.

I would hit up the Back to School sales and put together a bundle of stuff for kids. Anything I had left over at the end of the night was always donated to our local homeless shelter the following weekend.

You must understand - I begin searching for these goodies the day after Halloween.  I have my storage boxes of Halloween stuff in the basement.  As I find goodies on sale, I pick them up and add them to the box.  I usually hand out pencils.  Sometimes, if I find an amazing deal on crayons or funky pens or those little packs of play dough, I'll hand those out.  I've found cute little erasers that I've held onto for an entire year. They were big and chunky, and they had some fun shapes to them.  Another year, we had a stash of books from cereal boxes that I handed out.  (The older kids who roamed through got the pencils, pens, and erasers that year.)

Use your imagination.  Kids enjoy candy, I know.  BUT, other treats are also fun to find in the trick or treat bags.  A few years back, one of our neighbors gave out packets of pumpkin seeds!

In our community, we get candy overload.  Almost every church holds a Harvest Festival or Trunk or Treating.  The high school's homecoming game and parade are held on Halloween.  The kids on the floats throw candy to the little kids, and then the little kids go Trick or Treating.  So much candy!

In light of the number of food allergies that are out there, Food Allergy Research and Education, FARE for short, has been asking for a new tradition to begin.  An allergy free tradition.  http://www.foodallergy.org/teal-pumpkin-project#.VFDmbRYT1OI

If you are handing out allergy free treats, paint a pumpkin teal and place it out in front of your house, along with a free FARE printable sign so that parents and children know that you have allergy free treats to hand out.

What a great way to keep Halloween fun for everyone!


*The teal pumpkin picture above was taken from this post on the Michigan Radio website: http://michiganradio.org/post/kids-food-allergies-will-be-looking-teal-pumpkins-halloween.
The Tiny URL above will take you directly to their website, but I wanted to make certain that I gave them full credit!