(Mostly) Candy-Free Valentines for Kids

Anyone else get sick of all the candy that our kids are constantly bringing home? I don’t hate candy, but I feel like there’s a CONSTANT stream of candy with kids. Halloween, Christmas, Valentine’s Day, Easter, Birthday Parties – it seems like there’s always some reason for my kids to have a stash of candy. I’m not anti-candy – I’m eyeing the stash of chocolate at the other side of my room right now – but I get tired of all the candy all the time. Plus, I grew up with brothers with severe food allergies so I’m sensitive to all the treats that kids with food restrictions bring home and then can’t eat.

So when Valentine’s Day comes around I’m always trying to come up with things my kids can give away that are fun – without giving out candy. This always results in me designing my own Valentines for my kids to hand out. I’m going through the archives of my computer today and trying to find all of those different Valentines so I can share them with you. This post might be a mess since I’m putting it together on Feb 12 and I know you all needed these yesterday – but I wanted to get the ideas out so you could use them this year. I’ll try to get it all cleaned up before 2025!

I use this cardstock from Amazon to print my cards on. I use it all the time because I would pretty much always rather design what I want rather than buy a card from somewhere else. I also bought this paper cutter from Amazon and it has been a huge lifesaver! It was something that I bought thinking, “I’m going to think later this was a waste of money” but I could not have been more wrong. The time that it has saved me when cutting out different projects – not to mention how much straighter the cutting lines are on those projects – SO worth it!

So without further ado, here are some of the Valentines I’ve designed for my kids through the years (note: some do still go with candy, but most of them have been something else.)

Sorry this picture is really old – I designed these back in 2013 and I didn’t have the best camera on my phone at the time and didn’t realize that the backlighting from the window wasn’t the best plan 🤦‍♀️ But I loved how these valentines turned out! I bought mini boxes of cereal and tied the cards with a plastic spoon on with a piece of ribbon.

I had 6 different designs that I made for these Valentines. I put them together in a PDF that you can print them out 12 to a page. I’ll try to go back and make a full page of each design in case you’d like just one of the designs. But for now, at least you have them!

I will go find one of these and get a picture, but I’ve loved doing these valentines with a bouncy ball. I use these little treat bags and stick in a bouncy ball, a printed card and tie it off with a bit of ribbon. Easy peasy, and what kid doesn’t love a bouncy ball?

This was the one time my son convinced me to do candy for a Valentine because he was really set on giving out Airheads. I can be fun sometimes! So I let him give out Airheads with these valentines. I think we ended up using double sided tape to attach the cards to the candies. It wasn’t the fanciest presentation, but he was happy with it and that’s what matters 🙂

One of my favorite places to get printable valentines is from my sister-in-law’s blog – JuJuBee Illustrations. She has a really cute Baby Yoda one that I’ve given out with a glow stick like it’s a lightsaber, which was a big hit.

I have a couple others that I’ll work on getting up here as quickly as I can. I’m also going to work on getting these up in a format where you can type in your child’s name to save you all the time of handwriting out your kid’s name. But for now, at least you might be able to use these this year!