Mishloach Manot (a photo essay)

Our Mishloach Manot got fancied-up this year. Lacking non-brown paper bags, I bought some cellophane bags for our shalach manos. Not having bought enough cellophane bags from Jerusalem, I caved two days before Purim and bought cellophane. My friends, using cellophane is a bit more work than using bags, but the result is considerably fancier than the old "white paper bag" standby.

I assume you noticed the (censored) label taped onto this little package. Husbinator prevailed upon me to print labels in English, even though the majority of our mishloach manot recipients are Hebrew-speakers. "How else will they know it's from us?" he asked. In the end, I agreed, but only on the condition that (a) we use pictograms to help out the non-English-literate and (b) kashrut information be listed in Hebrew. Picking symbols for "Happy" and "Purim" was fairly easy, and picking a symbol for our family name wasn't too hard, either. This, you see, is the sign we have on our front gate:

We own this sign due to the combined whimsy of myself and Husbinator, and we hung it on our gate for giggles and kicks. We did not expect the outpouring of confusion from the Israelis around us. The slowing down with rotating head. The full stop. The moving of lips. The discussions. The seeing us around and asking what on earth our sign meant. The endless parade of 7-10 year old girls asking us over and over again to translate, if they could see our walrus, why we hung up the sign if we don't actually own a walrus, to explain again what the sign meant. Basically, we had a solid three or four months of walrus-themed conversation, so the pictograph for our family name was fairly obvious. I am thrilled with how this turned out.

Speaking of how things turned out, I remembered after my Absolutely Last Grocery Run Before Purim that in Israel, one is expected to give nice gifts to daycare/preschool teachers at Purim and at the end of the year. Non-disposable plate sort of nice. I am very, very impressed with what I managed to scrape up for Dikla, using things I already had in the house: