Book excerpt: A wealth of beautiful and joyous music has been written for the Christmas season. Some of the most enchanting melodies can be found in this solo mandolin edition of the Early American holiday repertoire. For this collection, Tommy Norris has selected eighteen lesser and better-known carols and songs from the folk, shape-note, sacred, Native American, African American spiritual, and European hymnody traditions, and arranged them for solo mandolin. Each intermediate to moderately advanced arrangement is shown in standard notation and mandolin tablature. As a learning aid, a downloadable recording of the author's performance of each piece is available online. We hope these arrangements bring the joy of the Christmas spirit to your holiday season.