Halloween is a difficult time for gluten free children and their parents. Very little in the average trick-or-treat bag has an ingredients list and we can’t be sure that the miniature candy bars or similar items are prepared in the same way as the full-sized versions.

  A parent has two options: they can reinvent trick-or-treating or have a Halloween party that is exciting enough to convince kids to forgo trick-or-treating. Here are some suggestions for both those options:

Re-invent Trick-or-Treating

Here’s a report from a family who turned trick-or-treating into a math lesson by awarding different numbers of points for different types of goodies collected. One advantage of this is that children lose valuable points if they dip into their bags before the final contest. The article deals with diabetic children but certainly can be adapted.

This parent passed out special bags of candy  to the people in her neighborhood, along with a picture of the child in costume to avoid errors.

  Throw a Magnificent Halloween Party

Remember that both the Jelly Belly and Tootsie companies claim on their websites that everything they produce is gluten free. These two companies can provide all the Halloween candy that anyone really needs.

Try this collection of gluten free recipes that appeal to children. The pictures on this site will help create excitement for the party. Keep in mind that these recipes are not all gluten free but the substitutions will be obvious and , if worse comes to worse, the appearance of the foods is more important than the actually flavor.

The recipes in this collection are actually gluten free.

Here is a plan for a complete Halloween party titled “Eek It’s a Haunted House”. Some of the ideas will require modification to be gluten free. That's also true for this  plan for a party called “Calling all Ghouls and Ghosts”.

Published 9/13/08