"A Very Merry Christmas/My Holiday Song," Casey Shea (Family Records)

Shea is a young singer-songwriter from New York by way of the south who sounds like he learned music from listening to a lot of 60s folk-rock. The apparent A-side, "A Very Merry Christmas," is a ballad very much in that tradition, jangling bells and chimes over acoustic guitar strumming and lots of la-la-las to boot. It's a bit of a dirge-y tempo, however, belying the lyrical sentiment. In another old-school musical tradition, the B-side, "My Holiday Song" kicks off with a spoken word bit about making latkes for Hanukkah, followed by lyrics about how "you don't care about my holidays/We were raised in two different ways." The divergence of the Judeo- from the -Christian is played for giggles here. Yes, we're issuing a Hannukah alert.