Congratulations to any of you who root for the Seattle Seahawks. Being a former sportswriter, I know that a winning Super Bowl team is the one that executes its game plan better. On Sunday, the Seahawks' plan appeared to be focusing on the younger members of the New England Patriots' offensive line and pressuring their quarterback. The Patriots came close to figuring it out in the fourth quarter, but came up short.

Carter Woodson created what has become Black History Month because he refused to be erased. Woodson became a black historian the hard way. His parents, both slaves until a few years before he was born, needed his income in rural Virginia. So he worked as a sharecropper and miner, moving to West Virginia at 17 to dig for coal there.

When my wife and I visited Minneapolis in 2024, we loved it. Of course, having close friends there doesn't hurt. Or the fact that, as in every other trip I've taken to the state of Minnesota, the temperature never fell below 70°. That includes two trips in late September and early October, when New York was in the 40s. I have no idea what it's like when the high is minus 10°.

If you're not aware of Canadian Prime Minister Mark Carney's speech Tuesday at the World Economic Forum, learn about it fast. It's the future Trump bequeaths us. A world in which we, the people of the United States, no longer matter the way we have my entire 71-3/4 years. What Carney said, basically, is what we've been trying to point out since this country put Trump back in the White House a year ago.

What to write about? Just last week alone, Trump seemed to average more than one crisis a day. Iran. Venezuela. Greenland (imagine going back in time and trying to explain a crisis with Greenland), Minnesota, blue states in general, Ford workers, the Fed chairman, the environment, climate change treaties. I'm sure there's more. It's part of his overall modus operandi: create distractions and poke the wound to keep your enemies - and it's weird to think a President of the United States sees half the populace as his enemy instead of his boss - off guard.

I first became aware of Venezuela when I was about 6. I received a board game for Christmas that involved moving cargo from one international port to another. It was a great way to learn about international ports, one of which was Maracaibo, from which the country exports its oil. Then, of course, when I was a little older, I got Risk.

It doesn't seem as if this can go on. For the better part of the last year - since noon ET on January 20 - the United States has been building toward a rolling boil. The temperature ratcheted up almost every day by some new outrage emanating from a desecrated White House. Until we got to this point. A new year that starts with a divided - maybe hopelessly - country.

For me, one song seems to stand out in a given holiday season. It's a song I hear early in the season, just before Thanksgiving, and then it reverbs through my head leading up to today. This year, it's this song. The reason has only a little to do with the music. I think it's because this is a very bleak mid-winter.

The bad news for James Lord Pierpont is that he wrote his only popular song, "The One-Horse Open Sleigh," in the 1850s. No ASCAP or BMI, no on-air or streaming royalties, no Bandcamp to sell music online. The good news is that Pierpont was a jerk, so it's not as if a nice guy got stiffed. Many of his songs were written for minstrel shows in both the North and South, deriving laughs from stereotypes of Black people.

One of the more joyous holiday songs has a contentious authorship history. The song is credited to two marketing guys, Joseph Carleton Beal and James Ross Boothe, But the most famous performer of the song, Bobby Helms, said he and studio musician Hank Garland turned the lousy tune they were given into a holiday classic - and that the final recording bears no resemblance to the original.

Andy Williams hosted a variety show in the 1960s - he helped inflict the Osmond Brothers on the world with it. For one of his annual Christmas shows, Williams turned to his music director, George Wyle, for an original song. He and partner Eddie Pola came up with this one. Wyle wrote or co-wrote hundreds of songs. But the one you might remember is the theme to "Gilligan's Island," the most prominent lyric being about a "three-hour tour."

This is an optimistic postwar song made popular by oldtime crooners, Perry Como and Bing Crosby. It was written by Meredith Willson, who is much better known for "The Music Man." The song has a great opening line - so memorable that it gets quoted or paraphrased a lot. If you had a dollar for every TV anchor who will start a story with "It's beginning to look a lot like...," you'd be able to afford this holiday season.

Harry Connick Jr, came to prominence when his versions of American standards were featured prominently in Rob Reiner's "When Harry Met Sally." But this song, from his first holiday album, is one that the singer/bandleader wrote himself. It has a great big band vibe, with the band singing along at certain points. And it tells a really cute Christmas Eve story very vividly. The song has been covered since its debut in 1993. But it's Connick's version that's the definitive one.

The birthplace of this song is Wayland, Massachusetts, about 20 miles west of Boston. It was there that a Unitarian minister, Edmund Sears, wrote the poem from which the song gets its lyrics. In 1849, he joined with a buddy, Richard Storrs Willis, who contrinuted his melody called "Carol." Or at least that's how it goes here in the United States.

This holiday carol dates back to Germany in the late Middle Ages Over time, there have been translations of the original text and variations on the tune. A few variations are attributed to Johann Sebastian Bach, although at least one version was written by his father-in-law and first cousin once removed, Johan Michael Bach.  Some of us first came to know this song as "Good Christian Men, Rejoice,"an English version of it.

The answer is they're expensive. That's particularly true this time of year, when you're fighting crowds or scouring online sites for whatever it is the child in your life really, really, really wants. But everything about children costs big bucks. Healthcare. Diapers. Clothes. Toys. Sporting stuff. Music lessons. School supplies. Trips to the theme park. And that might be why people are procreating less.

This song is from an album called "Vincent LaGuardia Gambini Sings For You." Which, as aficionados know, is Joe Pesci's memorable character in "My Cousin Vinny," one of the funniest films ever. Pesci recorded the album in 1998, six years after Vinny's antics in an Alabama courtroom. It wasn't a swing at something different - he was a lounge singer in the New York area before he got into acting.

This is one of the - if not the - most wistful songs of the season. So much so that, the first Christmas that my son did not come from South Korea, I couldn't listen to it. The idea for it came just as World War II started. With the original Antifa - millions of Americans fighting fascists around the world - away from those they loved, it was thought a song like this would boost morale.

This song always sounded British to me. But it actually originated in western North Carolina in the 1930s. Its composer, John Jacob Niles, liked to take little snippets of music that people in his area sang and make them into full-fledged songs. In this case, he heard a girl singing three lines - the rest is his. Other folk tunes that Niles wrote in this manner are "Go 'Way From My Window," recorded by Linda Ronstadt, and "Black Is the Color of My True Love's Hair," recorded by Rhiannon Giddens. This version of "I Wonder as I Wander" is by Barbra Streisand.

Tom Lehrer once said that satire died when Henry Kissinger won a Nobel Peace Prize. Among his other utterances was this witty little tune he wrote in 1990 for one of Garrison Keillor's radio shows. When he died earlier this year at age 97, my holiday song research led me to this sparkler. Lehrer, whose day job was mathematician, did the bulk of his musical writing in the 1960s.

The first track BonJovi released from the 1992 album "Keep the Faith" was the title song. I can't say I'm that familiar with it. I'm not a huge BonJovi fan, although I think it's a fine group and Jon is a fine singer. But I - and a lot of other people - are familiar with the song on the B side.

This one has always been a head scratcher. As far as I could figure out, there was nothing nautical about the Nativity. Bethlehem is probably a 2-day camel ride from the Mediterranean. But apparently, according to the fourth stanza, the ships sailed into a landlocked town. So what are the ships the singer is talking about? It's possible the lyricist, William Sandys, was thinking of the three wise men as being the "ships." Camels, after all, are known as ships of the desert.

In the early 1950s, there were actually people who took offense at this work. They believed the original singer, a teenager named Jimmie Boyd, waa watching his mother liplocking some guy who wasn't his father. For them, it wouldn't have been a laugh if Daddy had seen what was going on, it would have been a sin. But, of course, we all know who's who in this tale, and it's really just pure, wholesome family fun.

"I Heard the Bells" is a reminder that. for many people, the holidays is a time of painful memories and a struggle to connect with the joy of the season. The lyrics are from a poem by Henry Wadsworth Longfellow called "Christmas Bells." He wrote it after his wife was killed in a freaky fire accident and his son suffered serious injuries fighting for the Union in the Civil War.

There are two things I want to write about today that, at first glance, seem incongruous. One is the 13th anniversary of the murder of 26 children and educators at Sandy Hook Elementary School in Newtown, Connecticut. Eleven days before Christmas, a person who had just slain his mother went to the school and fired an automatic weapon at 6- and 7-year-olds and the adults responsible for them.