Ah, the 4th of July. A time to spend with family, celebrating our country's independence. If you're from my family, you celebrate by getting up at 9 am, putting on an outfit of red, white and blue and driving to your Great-Grandmother's house in Niles, Illinois to watch the annual Niles Fourth of July Parade from her front lawn and then enjoy a classy afternoon of Boston Market catering and Bud Light. Here's Michael J. ("the J is for Jackson") Pierski setting up the obligatory red, white and blue lawn chairs for the parade.
The parade approaches...it always includes the marching bands, the clowns, the elected officials in shiny convertibles, the Shriners in their funny hats and bicycles, parade floats, and free candy and mini-American flags. We're Polish, so we love anything cheesy, like the parade, and anything free, like the candy and handouts.
My cousins are, by now, experts at this yearly parade stuff. They're saving their enthusiasm for the good stuff, the parade floats that throw out candy and cheap toys. If you look closely enough, you'll see that just about everyone's wearing the red, white and blue, and two of the girls are even sporting red-and-blue eyeshadow.
Everyone loves a parade...except if you're two years old, like my cousin Madelynn. She mostly preferred to check out the bugs in the grass.
Just a good old-fashioned Pierski Christmas cookie baking assembly line at Grandma's...you know, like back in the day before child labor laws made Grandma give you an occasional break from all your hard work.
My Grandma Marge is a big fan of her 1960s Christmas decorations: big, multicolor lights and home-made Christmas tree ornaments. My cousin Cassandra mugged for the camera as Grandma gave us decorating instructions...and I wanted to give you a close-up of her ornaments, because I'm pretty sure she and her mom (my grandma Alma) made a lot of them by hand. They just don't sell ornaments like this at Target, now do they?
I belong to a family of music lovers, and my Grandma Marge (who still puts on tight fitting jeans and goes out dancing) is no exception. She has a Jukebox in her basement that plays old 45's, and insists on the occasional impromptu dance party...call her a dancing queen, just don't call her old.
I love it when my relatives do this: ask us to take a picture and then all look in different directions. This is from yesterday's celebration of my cousin Stephanie's baptism. (She's the baby in the white christening get-up.)
My belated birthday cake from my Grandma Marge was epic: it looked like a Swiss Cake Roll, and had ice cream in the middle. Nothing says Happy Birthday like Chocolate-chip-ice-cream-birthday-cake. Cheers to that!
