It’s 50 percent art, 50 percent science, and 100 percent perplexing. What to give, how to give, when to give, whom to give.

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.

For the Rav:

Bake a Bundt cake, stick in mini “pareve” and “yoshon” flags, sprinkle powdered sugar.

When you realize that the group of bochurim dancing on your dining room table made a siyum on it, frantically empty the nearest paper bag and stick your “Simchas Purim, Mishpachas Davidowitz” label right on top of the “Simchas Purim, Mishpachas Freund” one.

Insert a pineapple and sparkling grape juice, because surely the Rav will wake up on Shushan Purim craving those for breakfast and think: I wish someone would’ve thought to send me some pineapple and sparkling grape juice instead of broken royal icing cookies.

For “everyone”:

Start with the process of elimination. Do not:

1. Make bark. Just don’t.
2. Make chocolate-coated pretzels. For the same reason as #1.
3. Send chocolate babkas, apple pie, apple strudel, or cheesecake. You’re too young for that.
4. Send chocolate-cheese miniatures. You’re too old for that.
5. Bake honey cookies because your kids are dressing up as bumblebees. When were you born anyway?
6. Bake, at all. Honestly, would you ever touch a black-and-white iced cupcake that has fingerprints?

Think. What could you send that’s classy, pretty, original, up-to-date, easy to prepare, easy to transport, and doesn’t cost a small fortune?

Nothing.

Next, go to Amazing Savings seven times and look into everyone’s carts, trying to figure out what people might possibly do with oversized martini glasses. Give up and go to the local Purim store and crawl under double strollers to reach the acrylic three-section boxes. Buy the entire case even though they cost $3.99 a piece, because there’s no way you’re returning for more in case one breaks. Lie in bed and stare at the ceiling trying to figure out what to put into those cubes and why the manufacturer didn’t make the sections one centimeter bigger so that a mini Smirnoff would actually fit.

Then, on Purim morning, when you recognize your dear little package (with a refurbished label) on your son’s speech therapist’s counter, swear that next year you’re sending pineapple and sparkling grape juice. To everyone.

For your daughters’ teachers:

With teachers, it doesn’t matter what you give. You can get away with something tacky, like flowerpots with fruit leather roses, with a poem about how teachers are gardeners, sowing and watering their precious flowers, and how grateful you are to see your daughter blossom. Or something like that. The challenge is when to bring it.

Miss Baum will be at her future in-laws from 10:30 to 12:00, Mrs. Hoffer will be home between 11:00 and 12:00, Morah Batya will be at one address between 10:00 and 11:00 and at a different one between 2:30 and 3:30. And so on. Of course, each teacher lives two miles from the other, and it’s obviously snowing, but missing a single teacher is like missing a word from the Megillah.

So before you rent a U-Haul to deliver your mechutanim’s mishloach manos, draw up a diagram of every teacher’s schedule and prepare for the sulks from your daughter whose engaged teacher just took off with the U-Haul.

Meanwhile, bless Mrs. Friedlander; she requested that the girls bring mishloach manos to school. Who cares if the roses get flattened in your daughter’s briefcase? The woman is a tzadeikes,.

If you happen to be a teacher, you need to figure out a slot when your own students should come by. If you can’t get away with Mrs. Friedlander’s trick, all I can say is, good luck.

For your sons’ rebbis:

Buy pretty paper bags and fill with shredded paper grass. Stick in a package of wafer rolls and a nice pineapple. Wait, why are you one pineapple short? Oh, the rav. Will cantaloupe do? Is pineapple a d’Oraisa or a d’rabbanan?

Prepare tips in envelopes, but suddenly recall Yisroel Besser’s Voice in the Crowd advice and open all envelopes to double the amounts and add super personal notes that have so much more value than money. You’ll need new envelopes, sorry.

Take out the diagram poster of your daughters’ teachers’ schedules. Rip it up and start over.

For unexpected arrivals:

Tell them not to come. You don’t need their bark, they don’t need yours. How did they get here anyway? Don’t their kids have teachers?

For your daughters’ friends:

Forget mechutanim. This is priority. The good part is, you don’t have to get involved. Okay, you shouldn’t get involved. You’re just a nerdy mother with hopelessly old-fashioned ideas anyway. Don’t bother. Just give them your credit card and try not to fly off the handle when they return from the supermarket without the pineapples.

For the pediatrician:

Only stop by if a kid is running a fever. Your bumblebees are obviously a thousand times cuter than all other bumblebees in the community, but your honey cookies will land in the same garbage can as the rest of them. The day is short. Focus on your daughters’ friends.

For your son’s speech therapist:

You completely forget about her until Purim afternoon. It’s not because you aren’t grateful — she truly works miracles and is a fantastic babysitter besides. But you know, kinehora, between the mechutanim and all your daughters’ friends, you’re human.

Just as you say, “Yikes! What can we send her?”, the doorbell rings. (And the oven and the telephone and the fire alarm.) You run to the door, accept the acrylic box from your neighbor filled with crinkle cookies, confection sugar clouding the inside of the once-transparent Lucite. As soon as the little Mordechai Hatzaddik delivery guy (sorry, did you say Moshe Rabbeinu? Right! You look just like him!) is gone, you Goo-Gone off the label and voilא! Thank you therapist, thank you kind neighbor, and simchas Purim to all!

(Originally featured in Family First, Issue 581)