Ask grandma to teach you the recipe that takes all day. You’ll get the food and a few hours of stories.

Long tasks are good excuses to be in a room with somebody. A recipe that takes hours hands you a reason to sit with an older relative and an open stretch of time in which the stories come out, and the stories are the part that is genuinely finite. The food is the smaller half of what you get.

Ask somebody in your family to teach you the thing that takes all day, and set an actual date rather than leaving it a nice idea. Write down what they say as well as what they do.