Well, first, happy Shushan Purim! My kids came home from school all hopped up on sugar and Yoohoo chocolate milk boxes, covered in glittery tattoos and face paint. No one wants to shower, and they're all laying on the couch in a chocolate and grape juice induced haze, calling for me to bring them the remote that is about three inches away from them. They are too weak to move, these poor children. It's going to be a long night, but it's all good because there is a blizzard coming our way tonight, and school has already cancelled itself for tomorrow. Is it just me, or do you also think that maybe our beloved teachers might be laughing all the way home? Now it's the mommy's job to shuttle the kids through their withdrawal symptoms once the sugar high crashes. It should be fun.
Back to crazy.
We made four different types of mishloach manot this year.
Crazy. It wasn't on purpose, things just seemed to take on a mind of their own.
One kind for the girls to take to school for the classmates.
Another kind was for the girls' teachers.
A third for Josh's work family and the last, our actual themed mishloach manot.
We chose baseball as our theme this year, and I found bags of mini Baby Ruth candy bars for 75% off and these very cute NY Yankees cups in Party City - 50 cups for $8. Wait, let me rephrase that. I found the chocolates and the cups and then I decided that we would be doing a baseball theme this year. An excellent sale always makes picking a theme that much easier.
We made a tag to go with the baseball cup - I don't have a picture of it, but (I hope) it looked like a ticket to a Persian Baseball League game dated 14 Adar 5777 at the Shushan Stadium in Shushan Habirah, Shushan. It took me an entire day to make them, a day that I will never get back again.
Our mishloach manot tagline (courtesy of my friend Jessica): Three strikes and Haman is out!
Moving along, one son was happy to be a baseball player. No, a hockey player. No, a baseball player. No, a hockey player. I felt dizzy.
Josh didn't want me to spend the money on a baseball shirt (jersey?) for him. He wore his old hockey jersey. The other son dressed as a mad scientist because why not? And I couldn't find my Yankees baseball cap so I wore my superbowl one.
We were not a cohesive group this year, but the mishloach manot was pretty dang cute. Until I ran out of the mini pretzel packs that were the main ingredient that was tying the whole shebang together.
As luck would have it, we were baking hamentaschen at the same time I realized there was no way we'd have enough pretzels. But we did have a lot of hamentaschen dough. A lot of dough. Why? Because when I made the dough, I forgot that the written recipe was already doubled, so I doubled it. I felt vaguely troubled when I cracked eight eggs into the bowl, but who am I to doubt the recipe, so I went along with it. And then all of a sudden, there was a enough dough for a small village to make hamentaschen.
Early on in the hamentaschen making, we ran out of jelly, so that was the end of that. First I was annoyed, but then we regrouped and made baseball shaped cookies (circles really :) to use as filler instead of the pretzels. Done and done.
We also filled the cups with Twizzlers and sour belts because they are long and thin and were my pretend baseball bats. Each cup also got either a cookie or a bag of pretzels, or sometimes both (we made a lot of cookies) and a Baby Ruth chocolate bar. Except the ones that went to school - those got plain old Hershey bars because they are peanut-less.
I had a slight panic attack when I realized that I'd need to wrap cellophane around each one because there is nothing that ruins mishloach manot making like having to play around with cellophane that never does what it's supposed to do. But! But! Did you know cellophane comes pre-made in different sized bags? I knew they came in an x-large size for very big gift baskets but it seems they come in mini too, which were a perfect size, and were available, serendipitously enough, at the exact same Michael's that my friend Goldie happened to be standing in when I called her to cry about the my cellophane problem.
It was obviously a Purim miracle.
Next up: Superhero chocolate bars for our teachers.
:)
Jen