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It's the end of the year, and it's time to take stock. We'll look back at some of the year's biggest New England sports stories with Vin Sylvia, Deputy Managing Editor for Sports at the New Hampshire Union Leader. We'll also talk with Jeff Feingold at the New Hampshire Business Review to recap some of New Hampshire's biggest economic stories of 2005.

We'll close out the year with a chat with humorist Rebecca Rule. She'll tell us what the end of 2005 means to her and let us in on some Yankee New Year traditions.

Seacoast Online calls David Surette's playing "faultless, poignant, and sharp." That kind of praise has become common for the guitarist and mandolin player from South Berwick, Maine. He's well known in New England Celtic circles, and he's just released a new album called "Northern Roots". We'll talk with David about that and how he keeps traditional music sounding fresh.

Author Donna Ciocca has achieved one of life's impossibilities: she's written books that makes kids laugh out loud. Her most recent work, Tavern Tales tells the semi-autobiographical story of being raised by her strongminded grandmother who ran a tavern in Missouri. Donna will talk about writing humor and will clarify what's fact and what's fiction in her new book.

We close tonight's show with a song that takes place in a bar, but this particular story doesn't share the light-heartedness that characterizes many of Donna Ciocca's tavern tales. Ted Sink is a musician from Portsmouth. He joined us on the Front Porch back in February of last year, and we talked with him about his late-blooming musical career and about his own battles with alcohol abuse. We'll hear a bit of that interview and his song "One Last Time".

Lillian Buckley got a calling 15 years ago and answered it by becoming an ordained minister through the Harvard Divinity School. Now, the Kittery native is a minister in Strafford, a composer, gospel singer, and painter -- that's in addition to her 9-to-5 job in Boston. We'll play some cuts from Lillian's new CD Utterance and hear her sing some Christmas gospel live in the Front Porch studios.

The phenomenon and number of CSI television shows is having an impact on the forensics labs and some of the universities and colleges of New Hampshire. We'll talk with state forensics expert Tim Pifer about the positive and negative effect the CSI shows are having on his lab work. And, we have a conversation with Ben Cherington, the New Hampshire native who's the new co-manager of the Boston Red Sox.