By Internet Correspondent Chris Nuttall
Have yourself a very virtual Christmas this year, with a Santa's sackful of sites to surf with Yuletide themes.

They range from the tacky home-made to the tastefully-themed efforts aimed at persuading online shoppers to part with their Christmas cash. Here is News Online's Christmas site survival guide:

• Good King Wenceslas last logged on: If you want to sing along to Christmas carols, Claus.com provides a Christmas karaoke page with words and music to Jingle Bells, We Wish you a Merry Christmas and Jolly Old St Nicolas. If you yearn to yodel the whole canon of carols, try the Leal family of Oklahoma's lyrics page with the words to 96 carols and some irritating midi files as accompaniment.

• Host of Christmas past: Perhaps the best carol is not a song at all. You can read the complete illustrated text of Dickens' A Christmas Carol at the University of Virginia Library. And perhaps the best Christmas film of all time, It's a Wonderful Life, has a wonderful site, including 93 sound excerpts ending with the bell ringing on the Christmas tree as George and daughter Zuzu celebrate Clarence getting his wings

• Y2K-compliant Advent calendars: There are countdowns to Christmas galore from Christmas.com's clock to the Teletubbies advent calendar. Our favourite: the I'm Dreaming of a White Trash Christmas advent calendar featuring Tupperware windows and drunken recipes for Christmas cake.

• Send a gif not a gift: There are plenty of opportunities to clog friends' and family's mailboxes with Christmas card gifs, but this seasonal spam has been made palatable by sites who send a short message with an url linking to the Christmas card. Arthouse of Dublin offer the most cultured digicards and allow you to send a greeting translated into any language from Basque to Icelandic. A tackier option is Blue Mountain's animated, musical cards.

• Cracking jokes: Now to Christmas dinner, and if you want to pull a cracker, boxes are selling fast at BBL of West Yorkshire, while Absolutely Crackers allows online chats about crackers and gives their history since they were invented by Tom Smith in Britain in 1847. For some truly awful Christmas cracker jokes, visit Owen Williams' site if you dare.

• Recipes for disaster: If you can't be bothered to cook anybody Christmas dinner or buy a turkey, help is at hand online. Blanca Jackson has published fake recipes for Christmas cake, cranberry sauce and other goodies, which need nothing more than a tin opener. For a little extra effort, the Vegetarian Society has a Christmas menu with a Luxury Nut and Seed Loaf replacing the traditional roast.

• Roasting Santa and Rudolph: To make sure you get the presents you want, there are a multitude of methods of reaching Santa. Go direct to Lapland with the Virtual Finland site or to Santa Claus' office in the Santa Claus village on the Arctic Circle. Santa's Post Office is also receiving mail at Santamail.com as is xmas.co.uk, Scotland On Line's Santa Letter and Santa's Grotto. Want to track those parcels? Don't go to DHL or UPS's Websites, try Santa Tracker instead. Don't believe in Father Christmas? Here's some of the proof you can quote from the hilarious OXymoron Humour Archive:

  "353,000 tons [of sleigh] travelling at 650 miles per second creates enormous air resistance - this will heat the reindeer up in the same fashion as spacecrafts re-entering the earth's atmosphere. The lead pair of reindeer will absorb 14.3 QUINTILLION joules of energy. Per second. Each. In short, they will burst into flame almost instantaneously, exposing the reindeer behind them, and create deafening sonic booms in their wake. The entire reindeer team will be vaporised within 4.26 thousandths of a second. Santa, meanwhile, will be subjected to centrifugal forces 17,500.06 times greater than gravity."

• It all links back to here: Finally, rather than listing the hundreds of Websites trying to sell you something this Christmas, let's save a lot of time and effort and reflect on the true meaning of Christmas: Luke, Chapter Two, on The Christmas Story Website:

  "For unto you is born today in the city of David a Saviour, which is Christ the Lord... Glory to God in the highest, and on earth peace, goodwill towards men."

  Amen.