Of course I love candy as much as the next person and Halloween is a great holiday but today some parents like to use this scary night to try to avoid the dentist and make a difference. Since people often ask me for suggestions, here are a few alternate ideas for your trick or treaters this year.
Trick or Treat For Unicef
Unicef has been doing Trick or treating for children’s rights all over the globe for over fifty years. Their bright orange collection boxes to collect change can be requested from their website. If you don’t have enough time you can improvise. For more info you can reference my post on Unicef from last Halloween here.
Trick or Treat For Sight Night
Sight Night is in its 10th year of collecting for charity. Instead of collecting cash, Sight Night wants you to collect people’s old unused eyeglasses. The eyeglasses that you collect are repaired, cleaned and delivered in person to people in third world counties that are not able to get glasses of their own. You can request a free kit from the Sight Night web site here or even print out your own. Since starting, Sight Night has collected over 1,000,000 pairs of eyeglasses and they even give you a certificate of recognition for helping others.
Trick or Treat for canned donations
Instead of signing up with a charity, you could collect cans of food on your own to give to your local homeless shelter. identify where you will be donating the cans of food so you can tell people why you’re collecting and who you’re collecting for. Have the kids make a sign to put on a wagon or cart that shows what good they are doing. They will inspire those whose door bells they ring and the other kids as well.
These are just a few ideas and of course you can always trick or treat the old-fashioned way, get as much candy as possible and hope you can avoid the dentist and the scale! Just talking about some of these with your kids simply reinforces that Charity Matters.
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