Making designs with Halloween candy

What happens when your kids start sorting their Halloween candy, and it turns into something that looks like a Paul Klee painting?

This year, our post-trick-or-treat candy sort turned unexpectedly artistic. What began as simple piles of sweets slowly transformed into a landscape of circles, lines, and color blocks—playful yet strangely structured, like something straight out of a Klee composition.

One of the best things about trick-or-treating is certainly the process of getting all that candy. When you get home comes the next best thing: sorting the candy.

Our 4th grader was stacking hers in nice, neat piles. Our 1st grader said her piles didn’t look as nice as her older sister’s. She asked me for help.

• First, our piles started off as neatly arranged rectangles.
• Then we figured we could arrange them in circles.
• With circles and squares, sometimes we had leftover pieces of the same kind, so we made lines going down, forming the look of flowers.
• Once you have flowers, it kind of makes sense to have a ground or horizon line.

It all started with play. It wasn’t preconceived to make a landscape. We were just messing around, making organized piles of candy.

Our 4th grader wanted to make something “cool” like that. I reminded her of the beauty of simply playing with materials without a specific plan. Just get your hands on it and start moving things around.

That’s when I realized it’s a lot like Paul Klee’s approach to art. Klee spoke of “taking a line for a walk,” letting curiosity and motion lead the way rather than aiming for a finished idea. He built worlds from shapes, colors, and rhythms that feel half-abstract, half-story.

In our case, the candies became our lines and shapes: Reese’s for trees, Kit Kats for flowers, Skittles for the ground, and Twix for the sun. A candy landscape in the truest sense.

When Klee painted, he often balanced spontaneity with structure, what he called “organized freedom.” That’s exactly what this moment of candy arranging felt like: a balance between sorting and imagination, order and play.

It’s a sweet reminder that creativity often begins with the simplest gesture, sorting what’s right in front of you and seeing where it takes you.

Sometimes, as parents, our job isn’t to teach art or order. It’s to make space for play and watch something beautiful (and unexpected) take shape.

Footnotes

The collage at the start of this post uses a Paul Klee artwork from the Art Institute of Chicago’s collection. “Fun on the Inland Lake” from 1932. Oddly, this artwork has only been displayed twice. For two months in 1962, and two months in 1979. It was given to the Art Institute in 1994. This artwork needs to be on display.