Some families watch television after a meal. Others disperse to their own rooms. In stylist Michelle Maguire’s extended Italian-American family, everyone watched her grandfather build precarious towers out of whatever was on hand.

“There was my grandpa’s usual dinner-party balancing act, grabbing any remaining post-meal items from the table, and then building his own Leaning Tower of Pisa – my grandma, her siblings, and their spouses whistling him on with great delight,” Maguire says.