Is there a hole in your stocking, or pink slips paper-clipped to the tree in a festive display? Times are tough, but the simple joys do survive. Pile on the blankets and give a gift to yourself this season, in the pleasure of a new book from the Dewey 780.9 section of your public library or your hip local bookseller.

Santa and your friendly postal carrier might be wishing that everyone gave digital gifts this year, as gift cards and iTunes credits surely lighten the load of their sacks. I'm sorry, St. Nick, but the perfect gift to thrill the music fan might be one of four new coffee-table books.

There's a lot to announce this week, after a few weeks of corresponding hiatus. First and foremost, starting this week, Daytrotter.com will be posting one brand new exclusive recording session seven days a week. Every day this month we're going to try to embody the holiday spirit more and more. If this trial month goes well, we'll continue the seven-days-a-week-of-new-session-posting throughout 2009. That would mean 365 days of sessions and at least 1,460 free songs. We hope that this makes you happy.

For those of us who grew up thumbing through endless peach crates of vinyl records, the thrill of the hunt for coveted slabs of licorice pizza is still alive and forever under the skin. We may not feed the turntable as often or stumble in and out of the long-lost record stores of an earlier era, but the hunger is there. Downloading a selection from iTunes isn't the same as examining a wall of import seven-inch singles, finding the new bass player for your band in the aisles, or hearing Miles Davis for the first time on a battered tube-amp stereo.