Calendar Chronicles

The Most Wonderful Time is a warm, funny, and unexpectedly profound journey through the centuries of stories, symbols, and surprises that gave us the holiday we know today. From the winter solstice rituals of early humans to the chaos of Saturnalia in ancient Rome… from the real Saint Nicholas to Coca-Cola’s Santa… from pagan ghosts and Yule logs to Mariah Carey — this is the true, tangled history of Christmas as you’ve never seen it. Along the way, James Johnson explores the contradictions at the heart of the holiday: joy and grief, light and darkness, sacred and commercial.

From New Year’s resolutions to Christmas consumerism, Halloween sugar rituals to birthday performance pressure, The Holiday Business walks you month-by-month through the cultural con. This isn’t a book about hating holidays. It’s about reclaiming them. It’s about seeing how sacred rituals became revenue events, how love got priced, and how freedom got scheduled. If you’ve ever felt strange about the way we celebrate —this is your permission to stop pretending.

Out of Time is the untold story of calendars, clocks, and the human obsession with taming chaos. From ancient moon cycles to atomic vibrations, James Johnson traces how we invented time, tried to perfect it, and accidentally built a system that now runs our lives — whether we like it or not.

Thanksgiving is one of America’s oldest traditions — but the story we tell about it is mostly myth. Thanks, But No Thanks walks through the real origins of the holiday, from the Indigenous nations who lived here long before the Pilgrims arrived, to the 1621 harvest feast, to the centuries of change that shaped Thanksgiving into what it is today. Along the way, it explores the wars, treaties, proclamations, school plays, family rituals, and cultural rewrites that turned a single event into a national tradition.