It's nearly Halloween hangover time and soon you'll find yourself staring at those piles of sweets wondering what to do with all that Halloween candy? Consumption is almost unavoidable but here are eight alternative ideas you might envision doing.

1. CREATE A MASTERPIECE

• Painting with Candy
• More Painting Ideas with Candy
• Candy Sculptures

2. SCIENCE EXPERIMENTS

• Candy Experiments
• Candy Corn Catapults
• Sink or Float Candy Experiments
• Candy Chromatography
• Science 2.0

3. MATH WHIZ

Candies come in many colors and shapes can make a great math tool. 

• Practice addition, subtraction, counting by fives and tens and multiplication and division.
• Chocolate bars are great for visualizing fractions.  
• Sort candy and figure out percentages.
• See how much sugar your kids collected and measure it out to visually reference.
• Try seeing how many calories are in your child's Halloween loot and post it here.

Here are some other great ideas.

4. CHANNEL YOUR INNER JULIA CHILD

With hard candies, like Jolly Ranchers, I make stained glass cookies. Look them up on Pintrest and you will see a lot of other creative uses for holiday baking.

Check out these cool agate rock lollipops from crushed candy.

Save some candy for decorating your gingerbread house. Halloween candies are typically small and perfect to decorate with.

Small candies like M&M's and candy corn are yummy in trail mix or baked into cookies. Add to your favorite granola, nuts, pretzels, raisins and mix.

5. DONATE TO A GREAT CAUSE

• Blue Star Moms of Marin, Novato, bag candy into quart sized ziplock bags. To make it even more special, have your kids write on index card something like "Dear Soldier, thank you and we are thinking of you!"
• Operation Shoebox
• Ritter House, San Rafael
• Ronald McDonald House, San Francisco

6. THE CANDY FAIRY

Set candy out for the Candy Fairy who will leave other fun treats instead like little toys, books and trinkets.

7. HALLOWEEN CANDY BUYBACK

Here are some local businesses in Marin who have partnered with other nonprofits:

SweetE Organic, November 1st-5th, candy swap and drop it in our collection bin in exchange for SweetE’s organic, non GMO, allergy-conscious candy without artificial dyes.

Marin County Office of Education, by November 7th, candy, toothbrushes and cards or other notes to the soldiers, 1111 Las Gallinas Avenue in San Rafael.

Ashraf Orthodontics candy exchange at their Mill Valley office. All candy will be shipped to our troops.

Nichols Orthodontics, Inc. candy exchange at their Greenbrae office. All candy will be shipped to Operation Gratitude, sending care packages to U.S. Military Troops.

Gila Dorostkar, DDS Pediatric Dentistry collecting Halloween candy and letters to send to our military troops for Operation Gratitude. 

Judy Husen, DDS, is collecting Halloween Candy.

8. RECYCLE

Fill up goodie bags and piñatas for the next party.