Kids' Nutrition and All That Holiday Candy!

Many holidays tend to be all about the candy. Of course, Christmas tends to be more toy-centered, at Halloween they have to go out and get it. For those of us who celebrate Easter? A fluffy bunny brings you a big basket loaded with the sugary stuff.

I consider myself lucky that my son isn't big on candy. He likes maybe two or three kinds, and even with a huge sack of something like M&M's stops after a few. So it's not so much an issue for me, but for many of my mom friends, it's a source of stress. If you go to get your child's hair cut, in a jar at many local stores, kids activities in town, they're just dishing out the CANDY. Lollipops, Tootsie Rolls, mini candy bars, Cadbury eggs ... by the time Easter rolls around, they wind up with a basket of candy and are either completely crazed or candied out. And the KINDS of candy! Eggs filled with a sugary creme to mimic real eggs, or caramel, or corn-syrup-saturated imitation peanut butter. Those icky PEEPS that go stale in a heartbeat ... they even have their own website—people build things from Peeps and play with them! The only one I know who ever ate them regularly was my 92-year-old grandmother.

I belong to a local moms club. When we did our Easter egg hunt last year (the first of many in our close group of townships), I bought tattoos and stickers for the plastic hunting eggs but no candy. Why? To be honest, I forgot, but in retrospect, I had remembered taking possession of the previous year's unopened eggs and had to go through ALL of them before storing them to make sure there were no leftover jellybeans, mini eggs or other candies inside for rot or bugs to corrode. Most moms didn't mind the lack of candy; generally at Easter egg hunts, kids would go all out to get the plastic eggs full of either the dreaded candy or plastic trinkets that would wind up crushed underfoot of vacuumed up anyway. Stickers and tattoos were the lesser of the evils offered. But more than one piped up, "What about the candy?"

What ABOUT the candy?? Most of our kids have enough candy and other sweet, unhealthy things. I won't even start abou things like diabetes, obesity, heart disease and high cholesterol in today's kids. And a little candy isn't a bad thing. But why make it all about the candy? Do something with all those hardboiled eggs. ...