Mishloach Manos 101

Here’s a guide for the bewildered:

For the mechutanim:

The trade-off of breaking that plate is that you’re going to have to send mishloach manos to your mechutanim. Of course this package is officially from “the kallah,” but you know whose headache it is. If you have any brains, do an out-of-town shidduch and render yourself exempt.

If you weren’t ro’eh es hanolad and instead landed a Brooklynite, you have no choice but to prepare bite-sized ivy-shaped royal icing cookies with hole punches, which you’ll connect with ribbon and hang from a handmade picket fence. But a week before the big day, the entire extended family will concede that it looks like kindergarten arts-and-crafts, and besides, all the holes in the cookies closed while baking.

Go to Home Goods, talk to fellow mechutenestes, start collecting ideas. Analyze pictures of the dessert table your neighbor got from her kallah last Purim, which arrived in a rented U-Haul, and think really depressing thoughts about how inept you are and what dark, ugly secrets your daughter’s chassan must be hiding if he settled for a family like yours.

In the end, send a chocolate log from The Nuttery, but replace the label with a poem you paid someone $100 to write, and humbly blush while your mechuteneste rhapsodizes about your uber-talented daughter.