He can swoop down a chimney and be out through the keyhole as quickly as he can touch his nose.

Now Santa Claus can also zip e-mail messages to thousands of children on the Internet with a snap of his keyboard return key.

Always on the cutting edge, old St. Nick and his elves are wired and cruising the sleigh through cyberspace.

Savvy World Wide Webmasters and their sites around the world are helping Santa's Christmas team answer thousands of e-mail messages from good boys and girls.

The setup is pretty much always the same: an interesting Christmas homepage and a place to type in your name, age, e-mail address and what you'd like for Christmas. At Christmas Down Under ( www.gil.com.au/ozkidz/Christmas/ ) you can sent a note to his Jollyness and then download the sound of Santa flying over Australia.

Santa's site in Norway (web.telepost.no/Santa/Claus.html) accepts wish lists and includes interesting facts on the holidays in Scandinavia.

The quintessential Christmas site (www.christmas.com) has quirky features like the "Xmas Files" with the low-down on Santa conspiracy theories, or the mysterious "Cyber Sleigh."

A log of Santa's secret movements shows footage "captured from an unidentified military spy satellite before its camera mysteriously turned off."

Closer to home, Jean Hamel has been helping Santa out in Montreal, with his Site du Pere Noel (www.compuform.com/noel).

The homepage is designed for younger children, with big letters and a storyboard concept to move from page to page.

Last year, Hamel received 16,600 messages from francophone children that he then passed on to the North Pole.

This year, paraphernalia from the new film 101 Dalmatians has replaced items related to Pocahontas as the most sought after on wish lists, said Hamel.

"It's usually kids who are six and under writing in, and I imagine them sitting on the knees of their mom or dad," said Hamel, owner of Compuform, an Internet company.

"And then sometimes I'll get messages from 30- or 40-year-olds asking me to find them a job."

But it will be a while before e-mail replaces the traditional method of contacting Santa.

About a million children a year still contact Santa the old-fashioned way by sending him a letter via the North Pole, postal code HOH OHO.

Santa's 13,000 or so helpers at Canada Post take in piles of wish lists from around the world, and promptly send back letters.

The federal agency has a spot on the Internet

(www.mailposte.ca/english/wh

atsnew/santa.html) with information on how to send Santa a note through snail-mail, better known as regular postal service.

But Canada Post won't be accepting e-mail messages for the big guy.

"There are still an awful lot of children in the world who don't have access to computers or the Internet," said Canada Post spokeswoman Teresa Williams.

She said a Christmas wish list is often the first letter a child writes, and is good practice on how to properly send a letter.

"With our hard copy Santa letters, Santa writes back in any language including braille. It's hard to do that across the Internet."