Month: October 2017

“Trick or Treat.” The sound reverberated around the neighborhood. Children of all shapes, sizes, colors, and costumes explore the suburbs attempting to find the best candy. I have lived in the country for my entire life. Yes, we have neighbors. No, they are not too far away. However, trick or treating on my road is nearly impossible, not to mention extremely physically demanding. Children and parents alike would have to hike up hills and through brush with their costumes before encountering another home.

For as long as I can remember, my family has celebrated Halloween with a friend in Mt. Lebanon, PA. My mom would round up my siblings, grab the costumes, and take off in the direction of the city. Jean, her best friend from middle school, lives just outside of Pittsburgh in the perfect neighborhood. Once we arrive, we all get settled in and prepare for an evening of excessive candy consumption. Every year on Halloween, we ordered Chinese food to eat before embarking on our “trick or treating” journey.

Me, my sister, my brother, two cousins, and best friend spend the evening putting final touches on our costumes and preparing to go out. These costumes, year by year, have become more and more elaborate and creative. When we were young children, our costumes were typical: a pumpkin, a bunny, a ladybug, etc. The Classics. But as we started to get older, we got more creative, but also more resourceful. My sister once successfully dressed as a table. Some of my costumes were simple in concept, but elaborate in execution. For example, I made a spectacular grandmother and a particularly dashing farmer. We often did group themed costumes as well. We dressed as Harry Potter characters, zombies, a rock band… you name it.

As much as I hate to admit it, my little brother wins best costumes by a landslide. Jack is full of ideas, and my mom, sister, and I help to make his ideas come to life. Some of his costumes are as follows: a marshmallow, gnome, French toast, a stick figure, etc. Although they are not always clearly conveyed, each year it is funnier. When he dressed as a marshmallow, most of the houses mistook him for a roll of toilet paper. The year he dressed as a mummy, by the end of the neighborhood, his entire costume had blown away. Pieces of the toilet paper he was wrapped in were scattered everywhere.

Although we have since stopped trick or treating together, lost every costume, and ate all the candy, it’s always fun to reminisce. Can’t wait to see what new Halloween adventures await us in the future.

If you can’t already tell, our family will take advantage of every opportunity to get together, talk, and eat. So with a family this size, having this much motivation, it is only natural that we go all out to celebrate Christmas… three different times.

As excessive as that may sound, each celebration is unique in nature. In roughly the second weekend in December, the first Christmas party begins. You would think that a family Christmas party is complete if it extends to aunts, uncles, cousins, close friends, and grandparents, but not in this family. This first Christmas party is characterized by the wide variety of my distant relatives: first, second, and third cousins, great aunts, great uncles, cousins once removed, childhood friends- some of whom I cannot even address by name. My Aunt Susie hosts, and we eat soup, all kinds of soup. Every year. Maybe this is what has fueled my general distaste for soup; however, I never leave there hungry. My dad’s cousin Frankie dresses up as Santa and gives apples, oranges, and candy canes to all the kids that tell him the items on their Christmas lists.

On Christmas Eve, celebration number 2 takes place at my house. This involves more of my immediate family, although it is gradually expanding. My mom’s parents, my aunt, uncle, 2 cousins, siblings, parents, and a few family friends arrive at our house around 2 or 3. We spend the day cooking, talking, and playing games. But naturally, it wouldn’t be a Staley function if we didn’t have themed competition. My cousins, siblings, friend, and I split into teams and construct elaborate gingerbread houses to later be judged by my artistic grandmother. Before departing for our local church‘s Christmas Eve service, we all cram into our dining room for a spaghetti dinner. The night is capped off by opening our first annual gift, a new set of pajamas.

The final Christmas celebration occurs on Christmas Day, back at Aunt Susie’s house, this time just my extended family on my dad’s side. Because there are so many cousins, exchanging gifts would bankrupt the lot of us. So instead, my aunts organize a “grab bag“. Everyone in the family that chooses to participate gets their name put in a hat and draws the name of one other relative for whom to purchase a gift. Recently, grab bag has been themed. For example, the gift two years ago had to be readable, a book, magazine subscription, etc. That year, my dad received a hand made book (as a front, I suppose) and a bottle of moonshine (the legal kind). Some adhere to the theme, others look at it more like guidelines. This year, it’s a nature theme, can’t wait to see where that goes.

For dinner, each year we pick a new country and prepare their cuisine. For as long as I can remember we have been preparing foreign food for Christmas dinner and it gets more unique every year. Many years ago we did France, and I still remember my Uncle Paul urging us kids to try his home prepared escargot. Since then the countries have ranged from Sweden, to Brazil, to Taiwan. Although I often expect to encounter some strange dishes, I always come hungry and leave happy.

So like most families, Christmas is a busy time of year for the Staley’s, but we are never too busy to spend time celebrating together.

 

Road trips. You are driving down the open highway with your friends, windows down, blasting music. The sun is shining, everyone is happy, not a cloud in the sky. That is a road trip, right? Wrong. That is a fantasy. Reality check: road trips are hard on the mind and body, especially when you take them with your family.

Road trips begin by waking up your young children at unforeseen hours to pack them tightly among 7 people in an 8 person Saturn Outlook. They are surrounded by ungodly amounts of clothes and food packed both inside and outside the vehicle. Oh yes, not only did our car have cargo box attached to the roof rack and zero visibility out the back window, but also two 50 gallon rubbermaid containers strapped precariously to the back bumper.

Did I mention the trip is three days long? When I was 12, my mom, aunt, sister, brother, 2 cousins, and I embarked on a long road trip to Yellowstone National Park. Driving along side us in another car were three more of my aunts. It was a family vacation for the books. We drove across 8 states and just short of 2000 miles. Every so often, we would stop to see a landmark, get dinner, or stay the night in a hotel. For example, we stopped at a restaurant in Chicago, the (not so) Jolly Green Giant, Mount Rushmore, etc. and posed unwillingly for photos before continuing on our journey. 

Aside from the couple stops to sightsee, we spent many hours sitting tight in the car, finding ways to entertain ourselves. Prior to the trip, the mother had bought some small white boards about the size of a piece of printer paper. Being the creative and entertaining kids that we were, we developed the car friendly “Forehead Game”. We would exchange whiteboards and write a noun or topic on someone else’s board. Everyone would return the whiteboards, and hold them up to their foreheads, unaware of what it read. The point of the game was to ask questions and quickly find out what your board read. We easily played this game for hours and hours, even after the drive had ended.

Contrary to popular belief, the weather is never perfect on a road trip. Take my word for it. As we drove on the plains of South Dakota, we could see across the flat fields for miles. It started as a bright sunny day, warm and pleasant; however, it took a sharp turn when we saw dark clouds on the horizon. Dark clouds became a dark sky, and then all of a sudden we were driving blind through a tornado. Questionably, we pulled over into a gas station and stopped the car, waiting patiently for it to pass while the winds shook our car and the gas pumps back and forth like blades of grass.

At night we would cram as many people as possible into small hotel rooms. Our hotel routine included unstrapping the rubbermaid containers and hauling them into the hotel. One night, the only room we got was the presidential suite, which fit 2-3 comfortably. My low maintenance, crafty family slept 10 people in that room, utilizing even the bathtub as a comfortable sleeping space.

Although this gave you some idea of what the drive up was like, this was merely a fraction of our road trip experience, and had no details about Yellowstone itself. But this is the cold hard truth about family road trips: carsickness, boredom, long naps, and mental breakdowns. Don’t get me wrong, we had the time of our lives, but that is coming from some kids that happily spent our free time having cherry pit spitting contests on the side of the road. It’s not for everyone and its certainly not for the faint of heart, but I do suggest giving it a try.

When I was four years old, my great grandmother moved into our home. We had only one extra bedroom at the time, and it was the guest room. My parents decided to add on to our home by converting the garage into what would forever be referred to as “Nana’s Part”. Nana’s Part had a bedroom, a walk-in closet, a full bathroom, and a living room.

Nana was in her 90’s for most of the time she lived there, but you never would have guessed. She always had her nails done, she still had her real teeth, and boy was she mobile. Nana typically navigated the house with one of her many canes and used a walker in her later years. She would wander over to the kitchen and make eggs over easy and toast. Many times Nana was successful with this, but often she would turn on the stove, put toast in the toaster and walk away. When she remembered about the stove, she would go back to cooking her eggs, but she would put more toast in the toaster, on top of the other pieces, successfully filling the entire house with burnt toast smoke.

Nana was a small Italian woman, feisty as hell. She’d tell you how it was without hesitation. Nana was blunt and opinionated. She liked my mom and my sister, she tolerated me, but she LOVED my little brother and did not pretend otherwise. Everything he did was charming. One time, we were in a department store and my Nana told Emily and I she would buy us matching shirts for the Fourth of July. Naturally she made sure to tell Jack to find something too, so she asked us how much our shirts were as a reference point. We told her, “$20, Nana.” She proceeded to declare, “Jack go pick out something nice, you got $30!” And of course, when we asked who the favorite was, her immediate response was Jack.

Some people responded well to Nana’s wit, some were insulted. She would get her hair done on a regular basis; sometimes she was pleasant, other times, not. But eventually the hair place asked that she find somewhere else to go. I guess the staff was on the wrong end of too many of her “Aw, go to hell” greetings. Eventually we found a place that would laugh and give it right back to her. Nevertheless, growing up constantly subject to this just gave me thick skin and a good sense of humor.

Nana lived with us for 11 years. When she was 97, it got too hard to care for her with what we had, so she lived in a nursing home for the last months of her life. It’s hard to convey the essence of Nana in brief, but her life was long and well lived. Not only just Nana, but also the lessons she preached can be described with one word, unforgettable.