Lightb / OP,
I’m not here to share cookies or hamentashen.
But seemed to me nobody answered your question: what people used to send in olden times.
While I’m not old enough to have received MM in the days when the Mitzvah was instituted (sorry to disappoint), I was around in what some people think of as ancient times.
People sent home baked goods. Ladies baked all their own favorite cakes and cookies and arranged a variety on a plate with one non-mezonos item. Sometimes that was an orange or an apple, sometimes it was a slightly more exotic fruit, and sometimes a small bottle of wine or whiskey was added.
I still remember my mother’s friends, many no longer with us, by their own specialties, and by whose MM the kids fought over.
This speaks for one community, chased out of their homes in Eastern Europe by the Nazis, who rebuilt their lives in America and tried to do things the way they were done back home.
I remember as a child receiving MM from more “American” families who had spent more time on these shores, and looking in puzzlement at the bag of chips and the bottle of beer accompanied by the ubiquitous orange, sitting sadly on a plate with nothing homemade accompanying them on their MM journey.
Time passed. The delectable many-layered delicacies, lovingly baked by skilled hands, were replaced by small tins of hastily home-made brownies and a hamentash, often bakery made.
Then a new minhag evolved, popularly known as a “THEME”. The costumes of the bearers of gifts must correspond to the foodstuffs in the MM. So pint-sized doctors will deliver syringes filled with whatnot, little builders will bring you candy lego bricks, deep sea divers will deliver jelly fish, tiny tots in sombreros will deliver tacos, and somewhere there’s always one dejected little boy who wanted to be a policeman but his mother put him in a bunny costume so he could deliver her carrot muffins.
It’s wonderful to see everyone concerned about the Kashrus of the foods we ingest on a day when there’s so much eating going on. After all, Seudas Purim is one of those times when we perform a Mitzvah just by enjoying our meal. But don’t forget the feelings that are supposed to be in your heart as you send and receive MM, even before one morsel enters your mouth.