With the Christmas and New Year’s holidays behind us and the calendar having flipped to 2026, we can now turn our attention to the next events that are coming our way.

And while the dead of winter doesn’t always lend itself to many activities, there still are plenty of things on the horizon.

For example, Jan. 19 is set aside for a couple of important events this year. The first is the Martin Luther King Jr. commemoration. Weather often plays a part in local events surrounding that day, but it still offers a chance for everyone to reflect on the messages King shared.

It’s also an important day for football fans — that’s the day the College Football Playoff championship game will be played in Miami’s Hard Rock Stadium.

February will be a busier month than a lot of us realize — it really starts on Feb. 2, when the attention of a good part of the country will be centered on groundhogs, and their predictions about when spring will arrive this year. The most famous of the rodent prognosticators lives not too far from here — and thousands will gather to watch Punxsutawney Phil emerge from his burrow and offer the definitive prediction.

Included in that crowd, no doubt will be many residents of our region, who will have been willing to drive the little-more than two hours it takes to get from Steubenville to the small Pennsylvania town.

No one is quite sure what Phil (or the many other groundhogs who will offer their annual takes on the weather) will see when they make their predictions, but we do know with great certainty that all of that attention will quickly shift to Milan, where the Winter Olympics will open on Feb. 6.

That will be followed on Feb. 8 by the Super Bowl, with this year’s contest scheduled to be played in Levi’s Stadium in Santa Clara, Calif.

As the football season comes to an end, the baseball season will be gearing up — spring training camps will open around Feb. 12., with the Pirates beginning their Grapefruit League schedule on Feb. 21, when they travel to Sarasota, Fla., to face the Orioles.

Those exhibition games lead up to March 26, when the Pirates open the regular season with a 3:10 p.m. game against the Mets in New York. The home-opener for the Pirates is scheduled for 4:12 p.m. on April 3.

There are a lot of local events spread out among the next several months.

And one of those happens at 11 a.m. March 14, when the Jefferson-Harrison County Regional Spelling Bee will be held at Buckeye North Elementary School in Brilliant.

This year’s event, which is presented by the Herald-Star, will be the next chapter in an annual competition that was first held in 1985. With the exception of the COVID year of 2020, the regional bee has been an annual event, and for all but the first couple of years, the winner has earned a spot in — and a trip to — the Scripps National Spelling Bee.

That’s the case again –but because of growing interest in the national bee, Scripps has made a few changes. The competition is still scheduled to be held in the days after Memorial Day — May 26-28 this year — but the bee will be returning to Washington, D.C., after spending several years at the Gaylord National Resort and Convention Center in the nearby suburb of National Harbor, Md.

While participants and their families will be staying in the J.W. Marriott in Washington, the actual competition will take place in the DAR Constitution Hall.

Locally, pupils have been preparing for the bee since they returned to school in the late summer. They’ve been competing in room and school competitions to secure spots in their school district bees, which will begin at 6:30 p.m. Tuesday when the Edison Local bee is held in the Edison High School auditorium.

The Indian Creek bee will be held at 6 p.m. Jan. 13 at Indian Creek Middle school, and the Buckeye Local bee will be held at 7 p.m. Jan. 14 at Buckeye Local High School.

The Toronto district bee will be held at 5:30 p.m. Jan. 20 at Toronto Junior-Senior High School, the Harrison Hills bee will be held at 6 p.m. Jan. 21 at Harrison Central High School and the Steubenville district bee will be held at 6 p.m. Jan. 27 at Harding Middle School.

The top five finishers and an alternate from each of the district bees will advance to the regional bee.

It takes a lot of hard work to make the program run smoothly, and the driving force behind that is Ron Sismondo, the director of curriculum and development at the Jefferson County Educational Service Center. He and a dedicated committee work to ensure that all levels of the competition go off without a hitch.

We are proud that we can continue to be a part of this annual bee, something that has become an anticipated part of the area’s late-winter calendar.

(Gallabrese, a resident of Steubenville, is executive editor of the Herald-Star and The Weirton Daily Times)