It's 13 hours since Jens Lekman downed tools and concluded his set at the Luminaire, and still my spine is tingling and my lips upturned into what can only be described as a smile. In his bashful, endlessly endearing way, the lovelorn Swede has careered round the National at Shepherd's Bush Empire and overtaken Joanna Newsom at the Barbican to take the lead in my best gig of the year contest. This was a captivating treat from start to finish; one of those rare occasions when audience and performer feel totally in tune.

Lekman is a difficult musician to categorise; an indie troubadour of the Morrissey-school, he writes idiosyncratic, small-town songs of awkward love and sweet summer nights and sings them in a charmingly-accented baritone. His lyrics are wonderful - "Yeah I got busted/So I used my one phone call/To dedicate a song to you on the radio"; rhyming "chilli" with "chilly" - combining artful naiveté with an eye for detail comparable to Mike Skinner, only with the suburbs of Gothenburg, standing in for underground London. A large part of Skinner's success, or indeed that of Arctic Monkeys, Kate Nash or Jamie T, is the recognition factor, hearing the familiar small details of one's own life and times mythologised and reconfigured in song. It's easy enough to mention Bacardi Breezers and Corrie, but hard to transcend their banality (ask Ms Nash). Lekman's details of drive-in bingo and drinking lukewarm English beer, by contrast, combine a certain Swedish foreignness with that recognition factor, and are always in service to the usually complex and conflicted emotions he conveys. So the cooking of chilli, for example, is part of a double-dare mating ritual against a freezing backdrop, rather than just a pointless bit of earthiness (viz. "Sometimes I have a cup of tea", Nash).

The main strain running through his songs, though, is a reverential/referential love for music itself; a balladeer he may mostly be, but he is as happy with a sampler as the Avalanches; The Opposite of Hallelujah, for example, is based on Give Me Just a Little More Time, while Black Cab teeters on a Belle and Sebastian riff. While your enjoyment mainly rests on buying into the world of Jens - the loveable smalltown boy who had his first kiss aged 19 on a snowy basketball court and hasn't had much luck since - this small world becomes more, a celebration of music itself, from Tutti Frutti to Warren G's Regulate, both of which he references. While the musical backing samples riffs and drumbeats, his songs as a whole sample pure spirit. It's immensely touching, joyful and - actually, like most of his approach, I'm coming to realise -  is best summed up by quoting his own lyrics:

If you ever need a stranger to sing at your wedding
A last minute choice then I am your man
I know every song you name it
By Bacharach or David
Every silly love song that's ever touched your heart
Every power ballad that's ever climbed the chart.

Last night's gig didn't look too promising. Lekman had posted on his blog that he was rather fed up of performing in England and being treated like a schmuck, and had announced that he couldn't afford to bring a band over. "I came home broke and sad and drew a big cross over the British islands on my earthglobe", he said of his last tour.

In fact, the lack of band was a huge bonus, as, backed by a hearty, bongo-ing blonde stage right, Lekman performed pretty much solo, with acoustic guitar. Truly his records do not do him justice, either to his voice - a graceful baritone, looped and eachoed to gorgeous effect - nor his musicianship - all tricky riffs and jazzy major 7ths and 9ths on the guitar. This was a night when you felt the musician increasing in confidence throughout, perfectly attuned to the crowd, relaxed, generous, magical, from the rambling introduction to Postcard for Nina - in which our hero is forced by his lesbian German pen-pal to have dinner with her father in Berlin and pretend to be her fiance to cover up his daughter's impending elopement to New York with her female lover - to the rousing click and whistle along to Pocketful of Money, via his remarkable rescue of Call Me Al - "Not a guilty pleasure - I hate that phrase. I'm proud of liking this song", he winningly said. Inspiring to see how much originality can still be wrought by a man with a guitar. Kind of hard to see why he still can't get a girlfriend...

Consider the exchange I had with my mother the other day:

"Mum, what do you want for Christmas?".

"Oh… I don’t know. Don’t worry about me this year."

"Well I have to get you something; any clue as to what you might like that thing to be?"

"Honestly, I don’t want anything. What do you want?"

"Oh. Nothing".

I have been having conversations of this kind with everyone on my present-buying list this year. No one wants anything. We have either all reached an enlightened state of asceticism, or, simply, saturation point. The early market reports confirm it: notwithstanding a bumper day's sales thanks to a car-free West End on Saturday, consumer confidence is at its lowest since 2003 and the High Street chains are predicting a bleak advent. Meanwhile, with the world economy looking wobbly, we are urged to spend as if it were a moral duty.

I should say I am delighted it's Christmas time - but nowadays I look forward to a fine lunch, jolly time spent with the family, bad songs. Everything, in fact, except the presents.

After a thorough grilling, I might admit that I could do with a sieve, which prompts an exchange like this: "A sieve?!" "Yes, a sieve, for sieving things - flour, for example" "Well that’s not very exciting - I’m not getting you a sieve".

Then I may reveal that I am toying with wanting a leather jacket - but then I wonder if I really want this expensive item enough to force someone to buy it for me? I actually find the idea embarrassing.

The worrying truth is that by not really wanting anything, I am being selfish. I am dispatching my loved ones into the fusillade of the high street without a clear objective, thereby obliging them to spend longer thinking about me and increasing the risk that I will receive something I really really don’t want.

This weekend, with only the vaguest idea of what to get for our families, my girlfriend and I set off on just such a sortie. After a nine-hour jaunt, taking in Portobello Road, Kensington High Street and Oxford Street, we returned with a single gift for my little sister. That was all. One female collague informed me that the meagre return was simply because I was "bad at shopping" - but my girlfriend, who's pretty good at it, drew a similar blank. We simply found very little to restore our "consumer confidence".

All this angst is reckoning without the year's largest assignment: buying something for my girlfriend, a task which grows more daunting each year as romantic and financial stakes are raised. Dare I tell her what I really want is a truce? Let the High Street suffer - let's sing carols instead.