On Halloween Night, after the trick-or-treating is done and the candy has been binged on and the children are snuggled all warm in their beds with dreams of tooth decay and childhood obesity dancing in their mother's head, the Halloween Fairy comes to our house.

She steals into the house using her fairy magic, and takes the bags of Halloween candy the children gathered up trick-or-treating. She leaves gifts: play silks, puppets, books, jewelry.

The Halloween fairy lives in a huge old abandoned tree at the distant end of a path we often walk in the woods, with her fairy family. Fairy folk eat only candy and honey.

So says my five-year-old, who has quite a love-hate relationship with this mythical character. A friend introduced us to the Halloween Fairy a few years ago, and my kids have alternated between setting traps for her to save their candy and celebrating her antics.

My older girl loves making up stories about The Halloween Fairy, and has developed a whole imaginary fairy community for her to live in.

Why invite this tricksy fairy into our house? We're a low-sugar household. Candy isn't verboten, but it's also not a frequent part of our diets.

Trick-or-treating is hard to resist. The costumes, the social ritual, the chance to ring all the doorbells in the neighborhood...even I want to do that once a year. I don't mind the kids scarfing down a fistful or two of candy while they're at it.

But we live in a boisterous, generous Halloween neighborhood with more cheerful adults than little kids. My girls seem to collect their entire body weight in candy in an hour.

The day after Halloween, the candy is still there. I'm left with two fiesty little girls who want it all, all the time. In the past, I've tried indulging them, which led to hyperactive chaos and upset tummies. I've tried limiting them to one or two pieces a day at set times, which led to constant fighting about whether or not RIGHT NOW could be a "special occassion" to have an extra piece, and left us with stale Halloween candy well into August.

Finally, we settled on just getting it out of the house, and replacing it with some gifts the kids can use.

Other practices I've seen for separating kids from their excess Halloween loot include: 

• buying it off them, and then taking them to a toy store to spend some of their booty.
• encouraging them to "donate" it to Daddy's office or the school secretary. My kids would never go for this.
• mysteriously "losing" the loot while "cleaning" sometime after the holiday.

What do you do with Halloween candy once the holiday passes? Keep it? Toss it? Give it away? Does your family have any peculiar Halloween traditions or stories? Let us know in the comments.