I'm at the age where it's easier for my family just to hand me cash and to let me get what I want for myself. They can't get me anything simple like a Wii or an iPod Touch. No — I would ask Santa for exotic stuff like bass traps, monitor speakers, scores by Morton Feldman and Steve Reich or albums by VOLA & THE ORIENTAL MACHINE and KAREN.

I also live 2,000 miles away from the closest immediate family, 4,000 miles from the majority of my family. And the number of friends on which I'm willing to spend money is barely a handful.

All that to say, I don't do many gift exchanges. I participated in one last night at a dinner party, on which I spent $5.25 trying get there because I got lost on some toll roads. (Go Christmas spirit.) I've got a gift exchange coming up with Double-A, which is really just an excuse to eat at Musashino. That's about it.

So this list of Christmas swag is … minimal.

  • A Røde NT1-A condenser microphone.
  • Sony Sound Forge 9
  • Mastering Audio by Bob Katz
  • In the Aeroplane Over the Sea by Neutral Milk Hotel
  • Feed the Animals by Girl Talk

The Mastering Audio book was purchased with funds provided in part by my mom, who has this running gag for Christmas. It's great. She'll buy this tacky Christmas toy and find nooks and crannies into which she'll stuff cash. And she's been pretty clever about the places she'll put it. Some years required tweezers.

I tell people I bought the Røde microphone with my company bonus, but in reality, I put that thing on Guitar Center credit. I usually get some form of cash for Christmas, and my plan is to use it to pay part of it down. It's a more intersting and simpler story just to say I bought it with the bonus. Is it really Christmas gift if I still have to pay for part of it? I'll consider it one since I've been meaning to buy another microphone for a long time now.

What I did buy with the bonus was Sony Sound Forge 9. I've been wanting to upgrade since I started working on some Eponymous 4 tracks with Japanese titles. The MP3 render supported only ISO-8859-1 tagging, and I needed UTF-8. Sound Forge 9 supports UTF-8.

The Neutral Milk Hotel and Girl Talk albums were purchased while I was Christmas shopping for my nephew and niece over at Waterloo Records. Maybe I should just consider those my usual CD purchases in a month.

The dinner party gift exchange limited purchases to $5, so I came away with:

  • A journal
  • A USB flash drive
  • A budget 2-CD set of classical music used in movies
  • Soap
  • A Swiss Army knife
  • A bag of dried tropical fruit
  • An electronic organizer

I actually like all of those gifts. I streamlined — I bought two packs of Moleskin journals that come three in a pack and split them up among everyone. Yeah, not very personalized.

I'll amend this list if anything else arrives.