Everyone loves Purim, but no one loves cleaning up from Purim. Yet the night after Purim, you have to sort through what you got for mishloach manot and figure out what to do with it. It’s like putting away groceries: if you bought minute amounts of hundreds of different foods—mostly unhealthy—and put no thought into grouping similar things together in the same shopping bag. (“Why did we buy unwrapped jelly beans?” “Why is every can of soda in a different bag?” “Is this for Shabbat, or…?” “Why did we buy this thing if we don’t even know what it is?”)

Or maybe it’s like unpacking from a vacation, where you’re no longer excited, and you’re like, “OK, what did we forget to eat or refrigerate earlier today?” And everything is crushed and a reminder that Pesach is coming.

In my house, we make a whole ceremony out of unboxing, because people have themes, and if we’re not all there when we take it apart, someone won’t get to witness the theme.

Sure, sometimes you try to start going through it on Purim—making piles and so on—but then it gets annoying, because people keep bringing you stuff, and you’re like, “Can you stop! I’m running out of room on the table here!”

The issue is that, by the end of Purim, most of the mishloach manot we’ve gotten has been separated from the card that explains how it all goes together or who it’s from. If you’re giving something that has to go in the fridge, for example, your package is going to be intact for about five seconds. But that doesn’t mean everyone’s going to hit the brakes on their day so we can admire your theme before it all comes apart. People go crazy figuring out a theme, but to be honest, we’re not going to all gather around your mishloach manot and gaze at it in admiration and immediately start debating about where it should go in the breakfront. A theme would work a lot better if you were the only one giving shalach manos today. We’d be like, “And there’s even a theme!”

And even if there’s a note that explains your theme, there’s no way that note will still be around by the time Purim is over. Your best shot at having us understand what you’re doing is to write on each individual item, so that some Shabbat in the near future, one of our guests is going to ask, “Why did someone write, ‘Shushan Ha’ on your beer?”

When the kids get mishloach manot, they don’t have to worry about stuff like this. Kids say, “I’m going to eat a little bit of this at a time for the next 30 days,” and by the time the next morning rolls around, it’s all gone, except the pretzels.

We start off making piles:

• Things we need to finish by Pesach.
• Random drinks.
• Things that people left on our front porch without a name.
• Foods we forgot to put in the fridge earlier today.
• Unidentified hamantaschen.
• Mishloach manot we made but forgot to give out.
• Fruit.

And then each pile grows bigger than the area we allotted for it, and there’s fake grass everywhere, and I don’t know if this is a kugel or a cake!

There are some things we specifically like getting. When I was a kid, I had a friend who gave out the best candy, and I stayed friends with him for years at least partially because of that.

Nowadays, my wife and I like people who give out veggie platters. Do you know how long it takes to cut veggies? And we don’t have to fight with the kids for these things either. My kids say, “You like the salad people? Wow, that’s sad.”

No, when it comes down to it, I like candy more. But on Purim, I have plenty of candy, and no time to make salad. I basically just like what I can’t have.

We don’t eat the hamantashen, though. I know it’s a lot of work for you to make them, but we don’t remember who made which hamantashen anyway, and there are only about two recipes of hamantashen that I’ve liked in my entire life, and one of them is my wife’s, and I don’t get shalach manos from her, because she’s a girl, and if we exchanged mishloach manot, then according to halacha, we might be married.

I eat most of the other homemade foods, though. If you’re close enough to me that you’ve made my mishloach manot list, I’ve probably eaten in your house.

But, for example, I know somebody who, if you give them anything homemade at all, they throw it out. And I’m sure they have their reasons. But then they always give out something homemade.

And even when we’re done sorting all the food, we have to sort the packages they came in. Which bags can we reuse for next year? I’m not rewrapping your pre-cut size of cellophane around a plate.

There’s so much guilt in reusing the bags, though. All day long, people are regifting foods. We just regift bags. But we’re terrified that anyone should know. We’re scratching off tags, reattaching the handles… Bags aren’t germs! Was the original person’s intention that we should keep the bag forever? And do what with it?

In short, my favorite mishloach manot to get is something nice that I can eat for lunch on Purim itself, plus a chocolate that I like but my wife does not, in a bag that we can reuse next year. And no sticker. If you write on the sticker, the only person I can give this bag to next year is you. And you probably won’t even remember it’s yours. You’d be like, “Hey! They got the ‘From’ and ‘To’ mixed up!… In our handwriting.”

Mordechai Schmutter is a freelance writer and a humor columnist for Hamodia and other magazines. He has also published eight books and does stand-up comedy. You can contact him at [email protected].