Using Up Your Halloween Candy: DIY Advent Calendar

Shhh . . . come in close because I have a secret that I don’t want  your kids to hear. If your family is anything like mine, you have a HUGE pile of candy sitting at your house on November 1. I have a way that you can put it to good use during the upcoming holiday season, and if you do it soon enough, they’ll never even notice what’s missing!

Christmas is a big deal around here and I use this Halloween hack to create a special Christmas tradition for my children every year. This solves the problem of the Halloween candy overload created by trick or treating and endless parties and carnivals. It saves me money and lets my kids enjoy their Halloween treats over time instead of just giving them a little right away and trashing the rest. I use extra Halloween candy to create an advent calendar for my kids!

Saving Halloween Candy

In my family, all of the Halloween candy gets dumped into one big bowl on November 1. No one has their own bags anymore . . . it’s all “family candy.” The best part about this system? No one notices if a bunch of it goes missing all at once.

After my kids are in bed, we’ll sort through the candy and take out 4 matching pieces (one for each of our kids) for each of the 25 days of advent. This way you have one treat for each child for every day of Advent.

Pro tip: Make sure you remember where you did hide the candy that you saved! I have been known to hide things so well that I can’t find them later. Resist the urge to eat the candy yourself. If you eat the extra candy, you will be buying more to get through the advent season and the point of this is to save money while creating a fun tradition for your family.

Making Your Own Advent Calendar

Store bought advent calendars don’t always work for families with multiple kids. You get one little piece of chocolate each day and it is usually not even good chocolate. Using the Halloween candy you saved up for your own family advent calendar solves this problem.

As you draw closer to December 1, get organized. What you choose to put each day’s candy in is totally up to you. We’ve used fun patterned paper bags in the past, but this year, I bought some of these cute burlap bags! They can be used over and over, year after year! These muslin bags would be a good choice, too.

Making them festive is EASY with my printable advent tags. I currently have a two sets available. The first is a set of beautiful 4″ x 5″ numbered Advent cards available to print and download immediately.

I also have a set of black and white tags that can be printed on any color paper that you’d like! I LOVE how they turned out when I printed them on kraft colored paper.

Choose your style, print, cut and affix them to your bags. If you’re not using candy or treats for Advent, you can even hang the larger cards as a banner, and write something on the back. Some families will write a Christmas activity on the back of each card, or choose their favorite Bible verse to share. These tags are so versatile!

Make it Your Tradition

You create the holiday traditions for your family so incorporate your advent calendar in a way that works for you. Your kids might be excited to get their bag of candy when they wake up every day. In my family, my kids snack on their Advent treat after dinner while we read a devotional together.

Celebrate the advent season and find a good way to use all that Halloween candy your kids collected. I look forward to the days after Halloween each year when I can go through the extra candy and get it organized for our advent calendar. It is a sweet way to get focused on the season where we celebrate the love God so freely gave to the world and wants us all to experience every single day.

Still looking for Christmas cards? I have so many new styles available this year.
Check them out  in my Etsy shop!