What happens with your kids' Halloween sweets stash? Does it all get eaten in one go on the night? Do they carefully eke it out over the next few months until they get a re-up at Christmas? Or, do they go to town and then forget it exists until one night late in November when you have to admit that you already ate it?
Or maybe, a witch comes to your house on Halloween night to swap the stash for a toy? (Or in this lady’s case a whole basket full of toys).
This is the premise of the Switch Witch; an Elf-on-the-Shelf-like-occultist, who watches over kids all October long. If kids are ‘good’, then they can opt-in to the witch’s scheme and trade their Halloween haul for a toy or game (sounds like a raw deal all-round). Then, if kids have been sufficiently well-behaved, the witch comes to their house on Halloween night and makes the trade for uneaten sweets, along the same lines as the Tooth Fairy or Santa.
How this is applied varies from family to family; some kids are allowed to eat a few pieces of candy or chocolate; others more or less have to turn in the whole lot to claim their prize. Here’s a demonstration from a very cute Cruella de Vil.
The origins of the Switch Witch are actually pretty interesting. Audrey Kinsman is credited with creating the tradition in the early 2010s, when she wrote the story of the Switch Witch while stuck on a plane during a snowstorm. Kinsman’s son had a dairy allergy which made Halloween a pretty upsetting experience for him. The Switch Witch meant that he could enjoy dressing up and Trick or Treating, but not get sick. Win-win.
Now, I hear you: swapping out his stash for dairy-free options would probably have been easier, but we’ll come back to that. Instead Kinsman published her book The Switch Witch and the Magic of Switchcraft in 2015. In her story, sweets are some kind of energy currency that powers witches’ brooms, heats their cauldrons and keeps the witch world running. Witches can’t make their own candy, or go Trick-or-Treating (because they’d stick out too much, allegedly), so they need kids’ help. It’s a flimsy premise, frankly. And, I think, offensive to real Witches, who can definitely make their own sweets. Kinsman set up a company that produced a Switch Witch doll to accompany the book in a weird little gift set that sadly doesn’t seem to be available anymore. Not to worry though, because virtually any witch toy can stand-in for the Switch Witch.
The Switch Witch’s origin story is clearly born out of a real need to make Halloween more accessible for allergy kids. I get this. My child doesn’t have allergies – except that one thing that we don’t really know what it is; that’s another story – but we are vegan. And a lot of the sweets we get at Halloween are not (although s/o to Swizzels who made Parma Violets and Drumsticks vegan!). And while we don’t do the Switch Witch, I can see the appeal of having a cute tradition to swap out non-vegan sweets.
But pretty quickly after its inception, the Switch Witch gets co-opted by diet culture and turned into a way to stop kids, and I quote, "eating ten pounds of high fructose corn syrup". In 2012 Mama Natural, aka Genevieve Howland, posted this video to her YouTube Channel. Now, this was before the publication of the Switch Witch, so it’s not clear who came up with the idea first or if one influenced the other. But it’s pretty clear that Kinsman’s witch had benign intentions, whereas Howland’s is just straight up terrifying.
It’s hard to get stats on how prevalent The Switch Witch is. When I polled my Instagram followers, only 3 percent’s kids were getting a visit from The Switch Witch; 24 percent were a hard no; and 73 percent had no idea what it was. My sense is that it is mostly a North American thing, but I can see how it would catch on pretty easily here.
For instance, do you remember this hot mess from two years ago:
The Grinch Who Stole Halloween by Deliciously Ella
This is a screenshot of one of Deliciously Ella (aka Ella Mill’s) Instagram stories. Except this is less Switch Witch-y and more straight up The Grinch Who Stole Halloween. Deliciously Ella’s Halloween tirade inspired this piece of writing:
And I can see her embracing the Switch Witch ethos. She will certainly be able to buy lots of toys for her kids after selling up her brand for an ‘undisclosed amount’.
Of course, DE is just an avatar for virtually any influencer, and they all have an Amazon storefront full of toy suggestions to fuel rampant consumerism. This tradition is almost always targeted at mothers, the ones who are tasked with ‘creating the magic’ of holidays, and who are expected to martyr themselves in the process. If they aren’t constantly doing the most, they risk being branded as slackers at best, or neglectful at worst.
And at the same time, we’re fuelling the expectation that kids get ‘stuff’ at every holiday; a reality that most parents, let alone the planet, can accommodate.
When it comes to the Switch Witch, the thesis is always the same: kids are eating too much sugar! They can’t be trusted to figure out how much is the ‘right’ amount. They’re addicted to sugar and (non)foods. They need adult intervention.
We frame the problem as the kids. But the problem is not the kids; the problem is that we don’t trust kids, because we’re projecting our own stuff onto them.
Our stuff being: our relationship with food and our bodies; how we don’t trust ourselves around sweets; our experiences with disordered eating; the stories we’ve been told about greed and restraint and deservingness that now live inside us.
How many times have you heard parents say that they can’t trust themselves with all those sweets in the house? Or complain that they had to replace their kids’ haul because they ate it themselves? A big impetus behind the Switch Witch is that we don’t trust ourselves in the first place, never mind the kids.
This is nobody’s fault of course, but a reflection of the world we live in. Where thinness is valorised and fatness vilified. Where restriction and disordered eating are as ordinary as brushing your teeth. Where we ascribe morality and virtue to how little we have eaten. These are the lessons we learn. And these are the lessons we pass down to our children through devices like the Switch Witch.
While Howland congratulates her cunning plan to eradicate sugar and sweets from the house, she’s missing the part where the power lies not with the Switch Witch, but with the sweets.
Kids are attuned to the games we play; even when – or maybe especially when – we think we’re outsmarting them. The Switch Witch is no different. Kids already know that (most) adults make a BFD about sweets. We control access. We say they rot their teeth. We make up rules like ‘treat Saturdays’, or ‘no pudding until you’ve had your peas’. We pretend that chickpea blondies and black bean brownies are as good as the real deal.
But, the harder we push an agenda when feeding kids, the harder they push back.
Some of the comments on that Cruella TikTiok are really illustrative. Of course, there are a bunch of parents saying what a great idea this is to get candy out of the house. Others though reveal how this kind of restriction can lead to hiding sweets and eating them furtively, causing shame:
Others push back, highlighting that maybe there are better ways to handle things…
And how it could be different if we try and chill the fuck out.
So while the Switch Witch might stop kids eating candy and sweets in the here and now, it doesn’t set them up to have a good relationship with sweets in the long-term. It reinforces the idea that sweets are scarce. When sweets are scarce, kids understandably seek them out more and have a harder time regulating themselves when they get access to them. This is why they seem feral at birthday parties and Easter and Christmas and Halloween; whenever they’re given a free pass they’ll mainline sweets like there’s no tomorrow because they know that tomorrow there will be no sweets.
This behaviour gets explained away as ‘hyperactivity’, and chalked up to kids being addicted to food. A confirmation bias that affirms our original position: kids can’t be trusted and need food rules! What we are less willing to look at, are the ways we fuel their apparent obsession with sweets. By putting them on a pedestal; by making a huge deal of them; by micromanaging them; by interfering; by not letting our kids explore them and learn from their mistakes.
We’re also asking them to make a really hard choice. One that I don’t think many adults are capable of. Like, would you rather watch your favourite shows for a couple hours or eat your favourite snacks? IMPOSSIBLE. You want to eat the snacks while watching your favourite shows. And while it’s true we ask kids to make difficult decisions all the time, fabricating artificial binaries feels unnecessary and low-key cruel. Why are we asking kids, sometimes very young kids, to make really tough calls? To put it plainly: that’s not fair!
Last Halloween, Avery was just shy of 3-and-a-half. He understood that there were some sweets that he couldn’t have. And he also understood that we’d always make sure that he’d have plenty of sweets regardless. He sorted through his stash, picking out the ones that were chocolate or had gelatin in (with some help, obviously). But instead of making him turn it all in for a toy the following morning, we gave him a bag of the aforementioned Swizzle sweets and let him go to town.
He meticulously sifted through the Drumsticks and the Refreshers and the Love Hearts and the Skittles, sampling them one at a time like a tiny food critic. And in-between he had soup and bread and kiwi (because apparently we didn’t have dinner before Trick-or Treating if this photo is anything to go by).
I hesitate to even share this story: the anti-diet community has a tendency to romanticise feeding kids. In our efforts to undo some of the damage done by more conventional approaches to kids’ nutrition, we gloss over some of the messiness: the stand-offs; the level 10 nuclear blow outs; the days and weeks and months where not a single vegetable is consumed except as tomato sauce on a pizza. I am holding that this year could be different. That A is showing much more curiosity about Halloween sweets and that he’s deep in a watermelon Sour Patch Kids phase. And I’m trying to play the long game and trust him to figure it out (with some light boundaries/loose DoR).
So yeah, we *can* make our kids’ Halloween haul disappear with a *POOF*. That’s totally your call as a parent. But if your end game is to help them have a good relationship with food, this might not be the flex social media would make you believe.
So much of the fun of Halloween is that part where you get home, completely exhausted after a couple of hours of running around the neighbourhood messing about with your mates, and tip that bucket of sweets on the table. You sort through the disappointments (Fun Size Bounty GTFO); you trade with your sibling or set aside a pile to give to your friend who is really into Starburst; you chuck the tangerines in the fruit bowl and fish out the random 20p at the bottom of your plastic pumpkin. And finally, you get to sit back and bask in the glory of your hard work. Imagine then, how it would feel, to have to give it all up?
I’d love to hear from you. Have you heard of the Switch Witch before? Is this a tradition you’ve done for your kids? Are you planning on doing it this year (why/why not?). How were Halloween sweets approached in your house, and what impact do you think that had on your relationship with them? Did you get mixed messages making Halloween sweets seem even more enticing? Or was there a relaxed approach to sweets in your house growing up?
And if you have a kid with allergies/restrictions, how do you handle Halloween? Do you think the Switch Witch is a cute idea to trade in sweets they can’t have for ones they can? Or is it an excuse to get sweets out of the house? Let me know in the comments.
