Chick Wit

• Post-Holidaze January 11, 2026

  By Lisa Scottoline

  

  We have our phones with us all the time, but here’s the thing:

  You can’t call anybody.

  Or you can, but they won’t answer.

  I say this because I tried to call my bank the other day, but no one picked up. It rang and rang.

  Then I called my car dealership, and the same thing happened.

  I’m feeling like no one answers the phone anymore.

  And if you look on a website to see how to call them on the phone, there won’t be any number.

  They used to say Contact Us, but they lied.

  I remember when you could call a company and somebody would pick up the phone. It might not be a person, but it would be a message machine with options one through 7. You’d pick one, wait while music played, then a message would come on and say, “Your call is important to us. Please wait.”

  Now, the jig is up.

  They’re not even bothering with a mechanical message.

  You would think that they could put on a fake voice to tell me how much I matter.

  This would be my second marriage in a nutshell.

  To return to point, the one bright spot was on Christmas Eve.

  No, not that bright spot.

  We’re not talking the Star-of-Bethlehem bright.

  It was Michael’s.

  Yes, the crafts store.

  Actually to call Michael’s a craft store is to sell it short. Michael’s sells decorations, art supplies, glue, picture frames, and glittery stuff that you didn’t think you needed until you saw it in its vast store. Also there are rows of candy bars, and I always treat myself to a Snickers.

  In our family, the holidays mean a trip to Michael’s to get stuff for the tree, and we even bring the two dogs. We all had a great time there, and I treated myself to a Snickers. Daughter Francesca is our tree designer and she picked out the items we needed, among them a spray can of fake snow.

  When you spray a tree with fake snow, it’s called flocking.

  Who knew?

  You have to hang sheets on the walls so you don’t have an interior blizzard.

  Otherwise you’re flocked.

  Anyway when we got home it turned out that we’d left a bag on the counter.

  This is the problem when you go shopping during the holidays with two dogs. You get distracted by the holidays and the dogs.

  Okay, you get distracted by the Snickers, but that’s neither here nor there.

  So I called Michael’s.

  Guess what happened:

  They answered!

  A human being!

  Wow! I felt like I had entered a portal to an alternative universe or maybe the 1950s. I actually said, “You answered!”

   And the man said, “Of course.”

  So I told him, “Do you realize that no one answers the phone anymore?”

  “I know, but here at Michael’s, we always answer the phone.”

  And I thought, I might be in love with you.

  But I didn’t say that.

  And the next thing that happened was even greater, because he said he would look for our bag, which he actually did and then called me back because he could not find it. So I went to the store anyway to rebuy the missing stuff and Michael’s didn’t even charge me twice. They just swapped it out for the stuff that I left behind in my Snickers haze.

  And so on Christmas Eve, my faith in corporate America was restored.

  A miracle!

  Copyright © Lisa Scottoline 2026

• Naughty or Nice? December 21, 2025

  By Lisa Scottoline

  

  It’s the time of year when it we find out whether you’ve been bad or good.

  Unfortunately, my little puppy Eve has been Evil.

  She’s a year old now, so her personality has shown itself, and it ain’t pretty.

  Simply put, she’s an total alpha female.

  Or more accurately, a boss bitch.

  Let’s begin with the fact that she doesn’t like to walk.

  In fact, she doesn’t like to leave the couch.

  As soon as I get the leash, she throws herself on the ground and refuses to move.

  With one exception.

  If I ask, “Wanna go in the car?” Then she jumps off the couch and runs over for her leash.

  As in, she knows car.

  She wants to Uber around the block.

  I think a sedan chair would work, too.

  She basically doesn’t want her feet to touch the ground.

  What woman does?

  Don’t worry, there’s nothing physically wrong with her. I took her to the vet, and the diagnosis is that she’s a princess.

  And that’s not all.

  She doesn’t eat out of a bowl.

  At first I thought the problem was her food, so I did the whole thing where you order various overpriced ipsy-pipsy dog meals they ship to you, which involves defrosting, cleaning dishes, and special containers.

  But she still didn’t eat.

  Then one day I happened to drop some kibble on the floor and she started eating.

  Which is when I realized that she likes to eat off the floor.

  Now, I have to throw her kibble on the kitchen floor to get her to eat.

  This isn’t a problem except that she leaves a fine grit of chicken byproducts.

  After every meal, I Dirt-Devil the floor.

  Because of my dirty devil.

  You haven’t lived until you’ve walked in bare feet and ended up with Purina Pro Plan between your toes.

  And if your feet are as dry as mine, you’ll end up with kibble in your heel cracks, which guarantees you’ll be single forever.

  The other thing about Eve is that she does not play well with others.

  I took her to puppy obedience school, and she graduated, but she’s socially awkward. If she sees another dog on a walk, she barks nonstop at them, which is her way saying hello.

  It never works.

  Other dogs avoid her.

  Yesterday she scared off a German Shepherd.

  Or gave him a headache.

  As far as people go, she’s picky. She loves Daughter Francesca, me, and a few other of my girlfriends, but she can’t be bothered with strangers we meet. She lets them pet her, but she’ll stand there.

  She doesn’t wag her tail.

  She checks her watch.

  She’s rude.

  And it’s awkward.

  But randomly, she likes workmen.

  Any carpenter, electrician, or plumber who comes over, she flirts like crazy.

  Who doesn’t love a man in uniform?

  She sees that jumpsuit and she jumps.

  Yesterday I had a burglar alarm guy over, and Eve climbed into his lap and wouldn’t move.

  Meanwhile she won’t sit on my lap.

  She’s supposed to be a lap dog, but evidently it has to be a lap with benefits.

  So when it comes to the question whether Eve is Naughty or Nice, I guess I have to say Naughty.

  But I love her anyway, which if you ask me, is the point of the holiday season.

  Let’s not get all judgy.

  There’s too much of that going around lately, and we all need a little more acceptance.

  Understanding, even forgiveness.

  I love Eve for the little dog she turned out to be.

  And that’s Nice.

  Happy Holidays!

  Copyright © Lisa Scottoline 2025

• ‘Tis The Season December 14, 2025

  By Lisa Scottoline

  

  I have great news.

  Elastic waistbands have gone public!

  Let me explain:

  The holidays are upon us, which means I have to go to the mall.

  Which is outside.

  By that I mean, I work at home, so I’m in sweats and fleece 24/7.

  My daughter calls it my teddybear clothes.

  Because she loves me.

  But really, I’m a slob.

  And working from home has only encouraged my slobbiness.

  I have an entire wardrobe of sweatpants.

  I even have dress sweatpants, in cashmere.

  They look like 1,000,000 bucks, which is about what they cost.

  Worth every penny.

  Anyway, since I live in sweatpants, I look at jeans as the enemy.

  Because they have a waistband.

  And a button.

  And a zipper.

  Jeans are like a denim chastity belt.

  Even though believe me, I’m chaste.

  Only Mother Teresa is more chaste than I am.

  And she’s dead.

  I’m only dead below the waist.

  But I digress.

  Because jeans feel so confining, I’ve dreaded wearing them, which is a problem for going out.

  Meanwhile, let’s pause for a moment and think back to the time when women had a pair of nice pants, usually wool and in navy or black.

  Mother Mary called them slacks, but you get the idea.

  There was no slack in slacks.

  They had a real waistband, usually with the button and a zipper, and they had a crease down the middle. I have them at the back of my closet, but I can’t remember the last time I put them on.

  Maybe people still wear them, but I don’t.

  Remember I warned you about the slobbiness.

  If I have to dress up for a signing, I wear black stretch pants with a nice jacket on top. No one knows my waistband is elastic.

  Until now.

  What’s funny is in the old days, I wore jeans all the time and dreaded putting on a pair of pants.

  Now I wear sweats all the time and dread putting on a pair of jeans.

  In other words, I’m devolving.

  Unfortunately my waistline is evolving.

  To return to point, I had to go shopping for presents, so I stuffed myself into jeans and left the house.

  I was walking around the mall for five minutes when I realized that no one around me was wearing jeans.

  What?

  Every single person was wearing sweatpants or a tracksuit or some kind of teddybear clothes.

  Drawstrings abounded, swinging back and forth.

  Yes, I stared at people’s crotches.

  Men and women, but mostly men.

  Bottom line I was the only throwback in jeans.

  What?

  Since when?

  This is great news!

  I could’ve been a teddybear, no problem.

  Meanwhile I had a vise around my waist, like a do-it-yourself hysterectomy.

  The only people not wearing some form of sweatpants were women who had gone in the complete opposite direction, wearing yoga pants showing a midriff.

  In December.

  Now listen, if I had a waist like these women, I’d probably show it off too.

  I spotted abs for miles.

  But still, even my chubby tummy was cold.

  By the way, no one was wearing shoes either.

  Everyone was wearing sneakers.

  I looked like something out of the 1950s, with my jeans and loafers.

  So bottom line, I bring tidings of great joy.

  ‘Tis the season for sweatpants in public.

  Truly Happy Holidays!

  Copyright © 2025 Lisa Scottoline

• Column Classic: Christmas With The Flying Scottolines December 7, 2025

  By Lisa Scottoline

  

  It’s time you knew the truth.

  My childhood Christmases were not the norm.

  I’m reluctant to tell you because it makes the family look bad.

  But I’m a fan of the truth, especially if it’s funny.

  Here’s what happened.

  When I was little, The Flying Scottolines were a family of four, living in a tract house in Delaware County, Pennsylvania.  But my mother had a very large family and she was the youngest of nineteen children.

  Yes, you read that correctly.

  Nineteen.

  I had eighteen aunts and uncles.  Their age span was so large that some were dying while others were being born.

  Okay, maybe that’s an exaggeration, but not by much.

  What does this tell you about my family?

  I don’t even want to know.

  Let’s just say they were good Catholics.

  Maybe too good.

  What does that tell us about my grandmother?

  That she had more estrogen than the northern hemisphere?

  Can you imagine being pregnant nineteen times?

  It’s like a puppy mill, only with babies.

  By the way, my grandmother was married twice.  Her first husband died.

  You can guess how.

  His heart wore out.

  Before anything else, evidently.

  I would’ve said, Dude, before bedtime, maybe read a book instead?

  Anyway, when I was growing up, most of the aunts and uncles would come to our house for Sunday dinner and on holidays.  The house would burst with colorful Italian relatives, like in an Olive Garden commercial but not as well-dressed.

  Everybody brought potluck, which meant that we had 37 different kinds of pasta. 

  I adored all of my aunt and uncles, but my favorite was Uncle Mikey, the Fun Uncle. 

  He drove a convertible Thunderbird, love to sing and dance, and did God-knows-what for a living.  He loved to play with me and my brother, tickle us, and tell us dumb jokes.  But best of all, he always brought us presents on Christmas Eve, like Santa, only smoking a cigarette.

  All the other aunts and uncles would give us a Christmas gift by placing them under the tree for us to open on Christmas morning.

  But not Uncle Mikey.

  He would bring his gifts unwrapped, so we could play with them right away.

  Of course, we loved that, as kids.

  Delayed gratification was not in our vocabulary.

  I always noticed some tension between my parents and Uncle Mikey on Christmas Eve, and one year, the presents from Uncle Mikey stopped abruptly. 

  Bummer. 

  I asked my mother why, and that’s when she told me that Uncle Mikey’s presents “fell off a truck.”

  Not that that explained anything.

  I remember thinking that Uncle Mikey was the luckiest guy ever, always driving around behind trucks full of toys, just when things started falling off the back.

  What a guy!

  And he must’ve been the greatest catch, too, because when the toys fell off the truck, he caught them.

  Merry Christmas!

  Some kids believed in Santa, but I believed in Uncle Mikey.

  I didn’t care where the presents came from, only that I got them.

  Evidently, Uncle Mikey felt the same way.

  Then one day, after I had become an adult, I heard the term “fell off a truck” used in a movie.  And I learned that it meant the goods were stolen.

  Which is when I realized that Uncle Mikey wasn’t such a good catch, after all.

  No wonder Mother Mary made him stop.

  And no wonder the presents were never wrapped.

  And no wonder they were always the best.

  Because they didn’t cost him anything.

  The Flying Scottolines were receiving stolen goods.

  Luckily we didn’t end up behind bars.

  And so you get the idea.

  That’s who we were.

  Are you impressed yet?

  The truth is never impressive.

  It’s just real.

  And sometimes funny.

  Copyright © Lisa Scottoline

• Column Classic: Thanksgiving November 30, 2025

  By Lisa Scottoline / Francesca Serritella

  Here is a true classic and the first column Francesca wrote while in college, before she became a regular contributor.

  Intro from Lisa Scottoline

  Thanksgiving is about family, so I thought I’d ask my daughter Francesca for her thoughts about the day.  We spend so much time talking to and teaching our children that sometimes it’s nice just to ask them what they think, and listen to the answer.  So take a minute this Thanksgiving to ask your own baby birds what they think about the day, and listen to whatever they chirp up with. 

  Because I bet that the thing that you’re most thankful for is them. 

  Column Classic: Thanksgiving

  By Francesca Serritella

  

  My family is small.  Since it’s only my mom and me at home, our Thanksgiving has never been the Martha Stewart production it can be for some other families.  My dad’s family has Thanksgiving in New York; my grandmother and uncle have Thanksgiving in Miami.  My mother and I buy a last-minute turkey, make up some wacky ingredients for a stuffing, and eat together with Frank Sinatra playing in the background and a lot of warm, furry dogs warming our feet.  It has always been nice, and I know we’re lucky to have each other, but sometimes it has just felt small.

  Until Harry.

  Harry is our neighbor, he’s in his eighties, and we got to know him from running into him when we walked our dogs.  He used to go for a long walk every day, waving a white handkerchief so cars would see him.  He would stop to chat with us, always cheery and warm, even when the late-autumn wind made his nose red and his eyes tear.

  A few years ago, my mom invited Harry to our Thanksgiving dinner, and he arrived at four o’clock sharp, wearing a cozy and Icelandic sweater and graciously removing his Irish tweed cap as soon as he came inside.  During dinner, my mom asked him about his hobbies, and to be honest, I didn’t expect this to be the most thrilling conversation topic.  After all, my grandmother’s hobbies are crosswords and yelling at my uncle.  But Harry’s face lit up at the question.

  “I’m a Ham!” he said.

  We didn’t get it.

  And with that, Harry turned into a live-wire.  He talked about his hobby as a Ham Radio operator, a mode of amateur radio broadcast first popular in the 1920s.   Harry told us all about using radio technology while serving in WWII, and we sat, rapt, as he described sending a signal into the air, bouncing it off the stratosphere, and bending it around the earth.  He seemed like Merlin, hands waving in the air—his fingers had lost their quiver and his watery eyes were bright and shining.

  Well-meaning, but being somewhat of a teenage buzz kill, I asked, “Have you ever tried email?  Wouldn’t that be easier?”

  No, he said.  He enjoys the effort—a foreign concept in my wireless Internet, instant-messaging world.  Even though Ham radios can communicate through voice, he still uses Morse code sometimes, just for the fun of it.  Most of all, he enjoys belonging to the community of Hams.  “I get to meet people I would never meet.  I have friends around the world.”

  That night, it didn’t matter that Harry and I didn’t share a last name, or that we didn’t share the same relatives or the same nose.  That Thanksgiving, he was family.  He still is.

  What Harry and my mother taught me that Thanksgiving, whether they knew it or not, was that you don’t just get your family, you can create your family.  We do it all the time without realizing it; we form bonds with the people we work with, live with, learn with.  I’ve felt homesick up at college, but I’ve also created my own little family of friends at school.  I hope all those brave soldiers overseas have found second families in their comrades, people to support and lean on when they’re forced to be away from loved ones at home. 

  These second families don’t replace our first one, they just extend it. 

  It wasn’t until that Thanksgiving with Harry that I really got it: there are no rules for what or who makes a family, no limit on love.  The holidays especially are a time when we can reach out and say “thank you” to all the people who make up our many families.  And sometimes, if you’re lucky like me, Thanksgiving can even be a chance to set an extra plate at the table.

  Looking out the dining room window, I can barely see Harry’s house for the trees.  But inside that house is a man who is not alone.  There lives a man who is an expert at reaching out to people, whether by angling radio waves around the globe, or by flagging us down on a walk around the block.  He has us, he has our other neighbors, he has friends around the world.  Even better, we have him. 

  And for that, I am thankful.

  Copyright © 2007 Lisa Scottoline / Francesca Serritella